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Orations 

of 

Henry Austin Adams 



Introduction by 
His Eminence, Cardinal Gibbons 



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1902 



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CoeVBIOMT ENTRV 

CLASS C«-XX© No. 
OPPY 8. 



Copyrighted, 1902 

BY THE 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Cardinal Newman . 
Leo XIII. 

B. Sir Thomas More 
The Destiny of Erin 
Dr. Windthorst 



I 
45 

85 
129 

173 




INTRODUCTION. 



THE many friends of Mr. Henry Austin Adams 
will be pleased to learn that he proposes to 
present his lectures in book form. 

Mr. Adams was formerly a Protestant clergy- 
man and was in possession of a very lucrative 
benefice, which secured for him, moreover, an 
enviable social position. His reputation as a thinker 
and speaker was not confined to the limits of his 
congregation. Even when a young clergyman he 
was often invited on occasions of moment to 
address audiences composed of men and women 
who were well known in the highest social and 
literary circles. A fame such as is the lot of the 
few was assured to him when, through conscien- 
tious motives, he renounced his position with all 
its emoluments, and, without any resources but 
such as his own talents might promise, he declared 
his intention of becoming a CathoUc and placed 
his future in the hands of Divine Providence. 



viii Introduction 

He elected to try his fortune on the lecture plat- 
form. With what success, those who have had the 
privilege of listening to him will be pleased to bear 
witness. His graceful, flowing periods frequently 
rising by the very force of the ideas to the height 
of genuine eloquence; his rich imagery, which 
seemed to come naturally to mind just as the 
thought demanded the expression; his exquisite 
humor — sometimes seasoned with a bit of irony or 
sarcasm — always happy as it was often surprisingly 
delightful, have made him one of the most enter- 
taining, and, we are glad to say, most successful 
lecturers of the day. 

So numerous have been the demands for lec- 
tures from his admirers, so unsparing of himself 
has he been in his efforts to accommodate his 
friends, that his health was unable to withstand the 
strain. He has been compelled to go abroad for 
the purpose of procuring a much needed and well- 
earned rest. 

The present volume he offers to the public in 
the hope that it will prove acceptable to his many 
friends and procure for him the means in some 
measure of supporting himself and his family dur- 
ing his enforced retirement. 

While the printed lectures will be wanting in 
that personal magnetism which is one of his charms 



Introduction ix 

as a speaker, it is hoped that the subject-matter 
itself, which g-ives evidence of extensive reading, 
well digested by earnest reflection, and which is 
clothed in a style that is always attractive, will 
procure for this book a generous welcome. 




NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR. 



SINCE my happy submission to the Catholic 
Church nine years ago I have had the sin- 
gular privilege of addressing many people in all 
parts of our country upon the inspiring themes 
furnished by the history of our mother, the Church, 
and the lives of not a few of her sons who were 
among the noblest and greatest of men. The con- 
trolling motive of all that I have been permitted 
to attempt has been to bring to bear upon the 
hearts and minds of our young men the truth that 
in all avenues of human effort, and measured by 
every standard that man's ambition can suggest, 
the illuminating power of faith and absolute adher- 
ence to Catholic principles, so far from being a 
barrier and a restraint, have lifted those who com- 
pletely believed and obeyed to the very highest 
achievement. 

To combat the growing spirit of "liberal" 
thought which would fain have men believe that 
religion places insuiTerable limits upon the intel- 



xii Note From the Author 

lect and ethics upon the will, I have essayed to 
show, by the lives of men of genius and widely 
separated in time and place and characteristics, that 
it is only when the mind is truly interiorly enlig-ht- 
ened by faith and the will steadied by right prin- 
ciples that man can attain to his real best. 

In short, I have had constantly at heart one 
hope and purpose, that I might be allowed a 
humble part in the great work of bringing the 
young Catholic of today to know more clearly that, 
even in the natural order of the here and now and 
in the practical affairs of our strenuous and com- 
plex modern existence, the Christian religion alone 
can fit a man for that "success" which is proclaimed 
to be the goal and end of being. 

To make men proud of their Catholic faith is 
more than anything my work in life; and, as I am 
but a layman, I try to help as a layman may, by 
telling to my brothers everywhere the inspiring 
story of men made great by this same faith — men 
who compelled a hostile Avorld to bow to both the 
loftiness of their ideals and the unquestioned splen- 
dor of their achievements. May God accept my 
work and glorify it in silent, unseen ways in the 
hearts of men. 

HENRY AUSTIN ADAMS. 

Summit of Mt. Tamalpais, California, June 26, 
1902. 



CatDinal Jletoman. 



CARDINAL NEWMAN. 



THE hold which John Henry Newman has upon 
the heart of the English-speaking world is at 
once a most refreshing and not easily explicable 
fact. Refreshing, because it utterly disproves the 
libel whereby the age is held to be so sunk in mere 
materialism that it cannot hear, and still less com- 
prehend, the messages which come to us from the 
hills of life; and seemingly inexplicable, because 
no great man of the century was more removed 
from its strenuous ideals than the gentle recluse 
of Edgbaston. 

According to a certain cock-sure, statistical, 
cash-register view of our modern life, we, whose 
thought-impulses come from the genius of English 
literature and whose medium in the upbuilding of 
thought-empires is the English tongue, have been 
so immersed in the welter of ''success," so intent on 
''progress," so elated by the triumphs of "science," 
that we have no ear for the music of the Choir 
Invisible, no eye for the Kindly Light ! 



4 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Especially true is all this, we are told, of that 
part of the English-speaking peoples which has 
come to be looked upon as the least susceptible to 
all influences making for intellectual or spiritual 
uplift, the Americans. 

We are asked : "After all, is it not true that the 
real question in every American's mind is. What 
can I get? what can I touch, eat, wear, buy and sell 
at a profit? what can I see or hear?" 

And truly we are the most practical of peoples, 
and it is but natural that we be found so. It is 
entirely natural, and, of course, wholesome for the 
young animal to take more interest in the outward 
tangible than in the inward spiritual. A healthy 
boy is more absorbed in pie than problems — and 
we are young yet, very young as nations count the 
years. 

As yet the ''native hue of resolution" has not 
grown "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" ; 
nor have our world-amazing "enterprises of great 
pith and moment" their currents turned awry out 
of regard for anything in heaven or earth. 

Give us time, and doubtless when as old as the 
Germans we, too, will be metaphysical, psycho- 
logical and thorough; when as old as the French 
we, too, may be artistic and critical ; when as old 
as the Spanish and the Italians God grant we, too, 
may be contemplative, theological and mystical! 



Cardinal Newman 5 

But as yet we are young, and, rejoicing as a 
giant to run his course, we grapple the tremendous 
issues of today with a breezy, heedless, optimistic 
unconcern for the issues of the great tomorrow of 
the soul. 

And yet John Henry Newman was not wasted 
on us! We love him. His writings are now a 
necessary part of every library. His immortal 
hymn is now a spiritual classic in the hearts of 
milHons. His portrait (found everywhere) has 
made the features of the venerable ecclesiastic those 
of an old friend to Protestants, whose religion he 
rejected, no less than to Catholics, whose ancient 
faith he embraced — nay, to Hebrews and Agnos- 
tics. 

The great heart of our good President was com- 
forted not a little in the solemn watches of that 
week when the nation was with him in the valley 
of the shadow, by the recitation of ''Lead, Kindly 
Light," and one of the sweetest of the results of 
that dark tragedy has been the very wide dissem- 
ination of Newman's poems among the American 
people. 

It may be questioned whether any man of our 
times is held in higher or more tender regard than 
this serene old seer and prophet who lived out his 
ninety-one long years upon a mountain-top of 



6 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

undisturbed endeavor to keep his soul in almost 
contemptuous exaltation above those interests and 
aims which the age boastfully proclaimed the very 
end of living ! 

That Newman holds this place in the heart of 
our world is, one may be very sure, answer suffi- 
cient to the unthinking estimate that would aban- 
don us in the slough of self out of which there is 
no salvation. But how to explain this American 
interest in a man so utterly aside from our spirit 
and orbit? 

If it were Cardinal Manning, the other great 
English ecclesiastic and convert, the explanation 
were not far to seek ; for in him we have a superbly 
modern and practical man — a humanitarian, a born 
leader and organizer, an all-around "hustling," 
aggressive, resourceful politician — who took up 
causes with the enthusiasm which engenders its 
like, causes, too, which were those of the people. 

Strange that two lives can run so closely par- 
allel to one another and be so different ! 

Both born near the beginning of the nineteenth 
century; both educated at the same university of 
Oxford; both becoming distinguished clergymen 
of the Church of England ; both being converted to 
the Roman Cathohc faith, and, singularly enough, 
being elevated to the Sacred College of cardinals! 



Cardinal Newman 7 

Both, moreover, men of the most commanding 
intellectual eminence, and neither of them aloof, 
through ignorance or isolation, from those forces 
that worked upon and that environment which held 
the other. 

And yet how dissimilar! One might have fan- 
cied that Manning had a touch of good old Irish 
blood in his veins, for he could not keep out of any 
"scrap." If there was a fight on, Manning was in 
it and in it to a finish ! 

A bill would be brought into ParHament one 
night, and Manning might have a letter on the sub- 
ject next morning in the Times; a strike would 
break out on the London docks, and Manning, not 
stopping to think whether it would be dignified 
for one in the purple to have anything to do with 
a matter so vulgar as a strike, might jump into the 
first hansom, and in twenty minutes be down on the 
docks himself, standing between capital and labor, 
compelling capital to recognize its limitations and 
responsibilities; and then turning with the gentle- 
ness of unfeigned sympathy and getting labor to 
realize the god-like quality of self-restraint and the 
dignity of work ! 

His mitre seemed not so much a mitre as a 
helmet ! About his gaunt shoulders the vestments 
of his high office appeared less like embroidered 
silk than like a coat of mail ! 



8 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

In his hand the gilded crozier became not the 
symbol of a shepherd's authority over the sheep of 
Christ, but a battle-axe. 

To hear him preach was to hear a trumpet call 
to larger life. On some Sundays, it is true, one 
might have seen him sitting as meek as Moses on 
his throne, and his sermon might be on the Gospel 
for the day, on Penance, on Heaven, on Purgatory 
— on pew rent, possibly, or any of the themes 
improved by our own pastors for our edification. 

But on the next Sunday one might know by the 
twitching of his long fingers that there was blood 
on the moon ! 

And, sure enough, the sermon would prove to 
be a burst of splendid pity, an imperative demand 
for justice, a withering denunciation of outrage. 
He was the unterrified friend of the under-dog, be 
the color or creed of the under-dog what it might. 
The rescuer of the drunkard; the protector of all 
whom sin or ignorance or a false civilization had 
submerged beneath the awful turbulent seas of 
human struggle in London. 

American interest in him were easily explained ; 
him we might fancy made our very Patron Saint. 
The high-priest of our modern gospel of "salvation 
by committee," Manning was in his very element 
when he was adopting the constitution and by-laws 



Cardinal Newman 9 

of some new society or crusade, of which he had 
one ready for every ill to which flesh is heir! 

Could any man be less like Newman? New- 
man, whose cloistered mind dreaded distraction, 
and in whose calmer altitudes of thought things 
had a way of falling into perspectives that vanished 
into eternity, time and its fever losing before the 
unspeakable uplift of his conceptions their weight 
and fury. 

Thus were these two great men. That New- 
man, the man of gentle, interior, purely spiritual 
greatness, should command, as he most surely does, 
an incomparably loftier respect and wider follow- 
ing than the man of such tangible, practical effect- 
iveness as was Manning, is a sublime manifestation 
of our old world's soundness at bottom. The heart 
which has room for the subtle, nameless charm of 
Newman's spirit is one for which much may be 
hoped. 

But does Newman hold any such place as we 
claim? Is his influence really so great? I^et us see. 

In the first place, he affected English literature 
as few have ever done, as certainly none of his con- 
temporaries did. 

Again, he influenced the whole domain of theo- 
logical controversy, not only radically changing the 



lo Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

point of view of multitudes, but, better yet, infusing 
into the turbid waters his own exquisite and chiv- 
alrous spirit. 

More, he took ''John Bull," the seemingly un- 
changeable, and more profoundly changed him in 
certain eternally important respects than he had 
been affected since the Reformation. 

Let us examine these claims, now, in order and 
detail. 

I. As a matter of English style Cardinal New- 
man is held by all competent critics to have had no 
superior. With the one possible exception of De 
Quincy, no writer has left us such a monument of 
English prose; none has produced an English at 
once so lucid, so majestic, so tranquil, so transfig- 
ured by light ! 

But, it might be objected, does not the very fact 
that Newman's style is so fine — that his subject- 
matter is so high — preclude any wide influence 
among the people? Is not a message so refined 
necessarily ''caviare to the general"? Unhesita- 
tingly we may say, no ! 

Eook at it. It is now necessary that every man 
claiming to be an English scholar shall be familiar 
with Cardinal Newman's works. 

What does this mean? It means, certainly, that 
every educated man shall now, for the first time in 



Cardinal Newman 1 1 

three hundred years, be in the way, at any rate, of 
learning the evidence for Catholic truth, which 
those arch conspirators, ''the Standard Historians," 
have been suppressing with impunity. From every 
point of view such a result is a triumph of fair play 
over brutal, intellectual dishonor. 

At one of the foremost universities in America 
the recently adopted text-book of Hterature con- 
tains long extracts from Newman's works, insur- 
ing the delicious result that henceforth, ere that 
venerable alma mater confers degrees upon her 
sons, they must have run the risk of discovering 
that much of her own proud protesting in the past 
was but emptiness and wind! Doubtless the pro- 
fessors there caution the pupils not to believe what 
Newman says; but that were hke saying: ''You 
must not believe what your author states, but if 
you want to know the best way in which to say the 
other thing, then find out the way that Newman 
says anything, for that is the best way to say it !" 

Not to every man is it given to tell other men 
truth which they abhor in such a way that they are 
compelled to hear, in order that they may know 
their own language! This was Newman's unique 
prerogative. 

But lie not only wrote English which they must 
read who would be scholarly, he touched the very 



12 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

inner genius of our literature and wrought a mar- 
velous and refreshing change. 

We all remember the animus shown by the 
great writers of the earlier days. Not even glorious 
old Sir Walter, the stout knight errant who did such 
valiant work in breaking through the deadly com- 
monplace classism of the eighteenth century, back 
to the splendid ideals of the Middle Ages — not 
even he could wholly free himself from the uni- 
versal British contempt for "Popery." He gives us 
his drunken Friar Tuck; and all the usual ''Book 
of Martyrs," middle-class, impenetrable misconcep- 
tions of the stubborn British mind, find an unnat- 
ural place amid the magnificent largeness and regal 
nobleness of his matchless Waverly Novels. 

Among the lesser lights I cannot now recall one 
novelist or other writer who did not truckle to the 
popular prejudice and malign Catholics. 

If a priest were introduced, it was as a cat-Hke, 
sneaking, mysterious individual who might be 
counted upon for any act requiring duplicity, and 
who, it was darkly hinted, had a stiletto up his 
sleeve ! 

If the exigencies of the plot necessitated the 
poisoning of the coffee, it was never the EngHsh 
governess who was made to commit the crime, but 



Cardinal Newman 13 

the French maid, because she was a Papist and 
under the evil influence of some "Father St. 
Elmo," a wily "Jesuit in disguise !" 

As for the historians, essayists, and more serious 
writers, to a man they never failed to resort to any 
misrepresentation whereby Catholicity might be 
made to appear base or contemptible. 

All this has changed. In the recent novels that 
have enjoyed the widest popularity there has not 
infrequently appeared a priest, — and always the 
good father is drawn as the very embodiment of 
self-sacrifice, chastity or other heroic virtue. 

We are bade believe that, under some circum- 
stances, even a Pope might be a decent man ! And 
in such tales as "Helbeck of Banisdale" and "The 
Eternal City," apart from a sort of lofty conde- 
scending priggishness — which would be irritating 
were it not ridiculous — there is not much fault to 
be found with the admissions made in favor of the 
church's power for righteousness. 

They used to throw mud, now they throw bou- 
quets ! What has happened to bring about so glad- 
some a change? I will tell you what has happened, 
— Newman has lived ! Newman has lifted the Eng- 
lish world to the hilltop of his own unclouded and 
illuminating charity and mental integrity. Once 
only did he permit himself to enter the lists of con- 



14 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

troversy in his own defense, and that was when 
Charles Kingsley, the most popular novelist of the 
day, attacked the sincerity of Newman upon the 
amazing grounds that, as a Roman Catholic priest, 
Newman need not feel himself bound by the ordi- 
nary principles of honor and veracity, it being a 
fundamental principle of Catholic casuistry (a part 
of every priest's education) that a man may lie "for 
the greater glory of God !" 

The result was the publication of Newman's 
"Apologia pro Vita Sua," the literary gem of the 
nineteenth century. 

When the world had finished the perusal of this 
classic, not only did Newman stand forth superbly 
justified, but the whole body of the priesthood 
emerged from three hundred years of calumny into 
the fair, white light of a just and kindly public 
opinion. 

It was not the perfect poise of the stately sen- 
tences ; it was not the supremely dehcate revelation 
of the deep and holy soul ; it was not the absolute 
transparent truthfulness. All these great qualities 
were there as they were not in any other book be- 
fore, indeed, but it was not these that made the 
"Apologia" the mighty world force that it was and 
is. It was the fact that by one tender message the 
whole sublime subject of Catholicity was brought 



Cardinal Newman 15 

within the purview of countless earnest men to 
whom it was unknown or utterly misknown ! 

To try to measure the total of that book's influ- 
ence were to attempt to anticipate eternity. 

II. But the gentle Cardinal has laid our sorry 
world under still greater obligation. He revolu- 
tionized the temper of theological controversy. ''A 
gentleman," says he, "is one who never inflicts 
pain"; and to this chivalrous standard he con- 
formed his own conduct and was for the most part 
able to induce others to conform. 

Of the two which it takes to make a quarrel he 
steadfastly refused to be one. The "mud" which 
bigotry flung at him he suffered, as our good moth- 
ers used to bid us to do, to dry! It seems that if 
allowed to dry, no stain remains; whereas, if 
brushed away while wet, a spot still shows. Let- 
ters were answered when their hot, angry words had 
cooled. The rather rash and bumptious challenge 
of a zealous preacher to a settlement by pubHc 
debate of the whole issue was met by the delightful 
counter suggestion that each bring his fiddle to the 
hall and there determine their relative merits as 
virtuosi! 

We can remember what Protestants used to say 
of us in the good old days; and — may we be for- 
given !— we can remember what we used to say of 



1 6 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

them! There is some reason, though no good 
excuse, for the bigotry of a sound Protestant ; but 
there can be no reason, no excuse for that of any 
Catholic. Men are not very different from that which 
they are made by their inheritance, their educa- 
tion and their environment. The Protestant im- 
bibes an almost ineradicable anti-Catholic bias with 
his mother's milk. At the sacred altar of her knee 
he learns not only of the ''pure" faith, but of that 
dark shadow of error from which it was delivered 
at the Reformation. His pastors, his school mas- 
ters, his superiors and guides all allude to "Rome" 
as the very synonym of all that is opposed to 
righteousness and light and progress. 

''History" informs him of Rome's awful havoc 
in the past; the novelist, the poet and the philos- 
opher unite in proving that her blight is like the 
deadly shadow of the upas tree. 

How but by a miracle can a man escape so 
universal a conviction? But with the Catholic it 
is not so. His mother did not inculcate a hatred 
of non-Catholics as a principle of his religious 
training; his priest did not attribute all the woes 
of life to the rottenness of the morals of the Prot- 
estant clergy; his teachers and books and associa- 
tions do not tend to nourish in him a constant 
habit of suspicion and distrust of his Protestant 



Cardinal Newman 17 

neighbors. Therefore, the bigotry of a Catholic 
must spring from personal smallness and remains 
wholly indefensible. Now no one can deny that 
there has been a vast improvement. And New- 
man's share in this beneficent result is very great. 

When little men migrate from one religion to 
another there is perhaps a stirring of the parochial 
waters for a week or two, and then each goes on 
unheeded and forgotten to his appointed place. 

But when the giant skull of Newman, the might- 
iest head that God had put, but once or twice, on 
Anglo-Saxon shoulders — when that tremendous 
skull passed through the ancient wall of separation, 
it made a hole so large that millions of eyes out- 
side got their first look inside through it. And it 
must be remembered that one may see through a 
hole both ways ! So millions of eyes inside got 
their first look outside through that same hole! 
Looking into another's eyes is the best pledge 
peace has. The wild beast of hate dares scarcely 
hold the steady glance of chanty. Who rails at 
Newman proves himself an enemy, not of the 
Church of Rome, but of the light and them that 
love the light. 

Good Protestants are rapidly abandoning their 
former most unhappy frame of mind toward Cath- 
olics, and one of the most cheering facts in these 



1 8 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

great days wherein who wishes to may find so 
much of cheer is the immense increase of interest 
and of effort on the part of Catholics in and on 
behalf of Protestants. 

There is, however, much left to be desired. 
Some there are yet who need to be "Newmanized." 
A fine old Irish gentleman who heard me speak 
on one occasion asked to be presented to me after 
the lecture. ''Are you a convert, sir?" he asked 
me. I assured him that I was. ''Well, I do not 
think that you are half converted!" he retorted. 
And I found that the reason for this delicious bit 
of criticism was that I had alluded to the Episco- 
palians with affectionate respect! John Henry 
Newman contributed to the improved condition by 
the power of his written defense of truth and by 
the vastly greater power of his personal exempli- 
fication of the ennobling effect of truth on them 
that truly love it. 

His treatises rise like so many snow-capped, 
serene mountains above the somewhat volcanic 
foothills of apologetics. 

Confronted by such a champion the coarsest 
theological gladiator is apt to feel the need of the 
restraints imposed on knightly combatants. But 
his weightiest argument was just — himself! It had 
been the fashion in the English world to speak of 



Cardinal Newman 19 

Rome as the ''refuge of weak minds" ; and to think 
of CathoUc philosophy as of a system of rather shp- 
pery casuistical ethics, incapable of producing that 
virile, forth-right, ingenuous, broad-shouldered 
type of man that had, with sublime complacency, 
come to be called exclusively "Anglo-Saxon." 

But Newman has fled, as from a rotten, sinking 
ship, from our respectable old Church of England 
as by Parliament established! Newman has de- 
serted our Mrs. Grundy, that safe old chaperon, 
and has adopted the morals of the Jesuit ! 

Now, as it was impossible to think of Newman's 
mind as "weak," or of his great translucent charac- 
ter as "Jesuitical," only one thing could possibly be 
the result of his conversion — the whole British 
conception of the Catholic religion must be aban- 
doned. 

Can a man achieve a more glorious life-victory 
than this? 

III. In one other immense particular the in- 
fluence of the Cardinal may be said to have been 
unique. He changed "John Bull," the erstwhile 
almost unchangeable. The English character may 
be disHked, it may be condemned, but it cannot 
be ignored as at the same time being a force in 
civilization which must be reckoned with, and a 
soHd, beefy, reliable element in life which must be 
felt in all world-totals. 



20 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

His stolid, stubborn, irritating- self-sufficiency, 
his sublime sense of superiority, his undisguised 
contempt for others, and his insular insolence may 
make the Briton a disagreeable customer, but there 
can be no difference of opinion as to the effect that 
these national traits have upon the muscles of the 
neck! 

We Yankees boast of our ability to change, to 
adopt the manners and opinions of others, to know 
a good thing when we see it! And, in common 
with most people, we say, ''When in Rome do as 
the Romans do"; but ''John Bull" says, rather, 
"When in Rome or anywhere else, do as you did 
in Piccadilly!" And therefore we find him at the 
antipodes precisely as we found him at home. One 
might fancy coming across an Englishman on some 
distant planet and beholding him still attired in 
his Tweeds, his monocle in his eye, his Baedekker 
in his hand and banishing from further considera- 
tion everything that he found different from what 
he had been accustomed to at home, with his one 
word, "extraordinary!" 

Had one the philosopher's eye, he could find in 
a Briton's dictionary definitions like these: "Brit- 
ish — superior; foreign — inferior!" All of which 
tends, with the lapse of the years, to build up a 



Cardinal Newman 21 

temperament impervious to change, a conviction 
that change of any sort must be tantamount to 
deterioration. 

So "John Bull" had not changed. At the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century he stood as had his 
fathers for three hundred years. With one stout 
leg planted on Magna Charta and the other stout 
leg on the bulwarks of the Protestant Reformation ; 
lined with Southdown mutton, washed down with 
good old home-brewed ale; with the Squire in the 
hall and the Parson in the vicarage (like twin 
Coryphaei bearing up the superstructure of the 
British Constitution), "John Bull" stood there a 
Gibraltar of impenetrability, a monument of immo- 
bility ! 

The French were having (in his opinion) a 
coniption fit every few months ; the Germans were 
forever changing their moorings in their endless 
gropings through the fog-banks of metaphysical 
speculation ; and, of course, the Americans were but 
so many apes and monkeys. 

But the Briton, being superior in all respects, 
changed not! And in his splendid isolation he 
certainly had the satisfaction of seeing the com- 
merce of the world paying tribute into his cofifers 
in Lombard street; his ringing gold sovereign 
made the standard money-value in all markets; 



2 2 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

and his ideas, his institutions, his language, push- 
ing their irresistible influence into the remotest 
corners of the earth. 

So thought of change or of its de^irarbiltty was 
far from him. He ate his mutton on the same old 
table, in the same old room in which his great- 
great-great-grandfather had eaten his ! He voted 
the same old vote for the same old borough which 
his ancestors had represented from the very first. 
His sleepy old universities dozed on in blissful dis- 
regard of profane progress; and his church was as 
a cool cloister wherein respectability was secure 
from the impertinence of thought or action ! 

Such was the Englishman at the beginning of 
the nineteenth century. At its close we find him 
— the unchanging one — changed ! Changed, more- 
over, in that very respect in which it is most diffi- 
cult to change a man, namely, in his reUgious opin- 
ions. 

The Church of England today is not what it 
was one hundred years ago: its doctrines, its 
ceremonies, its schools of thought, its aims and 
methods — all are changed. For the better? Im- 
measurably for the better! What has occurred? 
The "Oxford Movement," as the greatest spiritual 
awakening of many centuries is now called, has 
transfigured the whole religious life of England, 



Cardinal Newman 23 

and of the Oxford movement the soul, the inspira- 
tion and the glory was, beyond all cavil, Newman. 

It was his towering individuality, his relentless 
eloquence, his moral magnificence that, more than 
all other causes, made the movement immediately 
and universally felt; and that his ''desertion" to 
Rome, followed as it was by that of scores of the 
choicest souls, did not terminate the great revival 
is in no sense a proof that he had not been its life. 

In these ways, then, our age has been affected 
by this singular and lovable old man. And now, 
to ask how it was possible that one so seemingly 
devoid of all the usual accessories of popular lead- 
ership, nevertheless did sway the weary world to 
loftier aims and soothe it into the calmness and the 
recollection wherein there may be hope that one 
may come to hear the music and to see the light. 

It is not possible to attribute Newman's influ- 
ence to the fact that he was a religious leader, if 
by that term we mean that he was one of that body 
of forceful, active, restless intellects which during 
that period of transition and doctrinal disintegra- 
tion crystallized from time to time the flux of cur- 
rent thought or suggested to the empiric mind of 
a world adrift and rudderless on the sea of specu- 
lation some catchy, ready-made hypothesis. The 
great religious "leaders" of our times were men 



24 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

more nimble than their fellows, with alert ears close 
to the ground ; men who, perceiving that doubt was 
in the air and that the tendency was toward a 
speculative, questioning and irreligious temper, 
were first to formulate new rationalizing creeds, 
foremost in the advancing drift toward theological 
"liberalism." These agile spiritual acrobats, behold- 
ing the sweep of current thought toward the Niag- 
ara of doctrinal disintegration, merely leaped into 
the stream a bit ahead of their less venturesome con- 
temporaries, and, being good floaters, shouted to 
their fellows: ''Follow us; we are your leaders!" 
The Sunday morning's discourse soon came to be 
a clever essay upon the latest fashion in doubt, a 
text being taken largely for the purpose of show- 
ing that it was, in all likelihood, not in the most 
approved manuscripts at all; and that if it were a 
part of the original scripture, so much the worse 
for God, the Holy Ghost, for Paleontology and 
Egyptology and Assyriology and Philology all 
proved that the poor text was inconsistent with 
the reason of the reverend Mountebank! It was 
an age of growing unbelief, and its accepted leaders 
were they who with the greatest audacity and the 
most brilliant eloquence voiced heresy in any of 
its alluring phases. 

At no time would a return to Rome's unyielding 
fixity of faith have been more regarded with super- 



Cardinal Newman 25 

cilious contempt than during precisely this period 
of scientific speculative doubt and of the apotheosis 
of ''Reason." No age has been in its very essence 
more alien to the Catholic principle of faith than 
was the nineteenth century. And thus we have 
seen that any and all religious transitions to and 
from one denomination to another have been con- 
doned and taken in good spirit — except the one 
to Rome! That was the one unpardonable, in- 
comprehensible moral and intellectual fall! It 
proved the man who could consider it seriously 
wholly unsaved by the glorious new gospel, a pa- 
thetic intellectual incompetent and moral degen- 
erate. So that, when Newman amazed the world 
by his staggering retrograde movement to Rome, 
he might well have expected the execration of 
modernized man, but hardly the title nor the power 
of a religious leader. That he achieved his un- 
doubted hold upon the earnest thinking of the age 
is evidence superb of his transcendent greatness. 

Alone, heart-high amid the eddies and the re- 
sistless rush of the on-sweeping torrent of laxity 
of thought, he strove, and faltered not until he 
reached the long-despised and contemned Rock of 
Peter. 

Planted on that lowly eminence he faced the 
proud and scoffing world for half a century, and 



26 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

lived to see the thoughtless, blind, antagonistic 
multitude listening in silent and almost receptive 
spirit to his unique and fascinating elucidation of 
Peter's faith. 

Nor was this gradual extension of his influence 
secured by any of the usual elaborated methods of 
an organized movement. 

He shunned aggressive, advertised campaigning 
as much as Manning seemed to have courted it. 
Nor did he much believe in the necessity which the 
alarmist feels for definite, immediate and strenu- 
ous action, offensive and defensive, upon the first 
appearance of noisy threats. 

Begged to come out and help save God from 
the attacks of the new agnostics, he answered that 
he would like to be excused because he was ex- 
tremely busy writing his history of the Arians of 
the Fourth Century ! Little by little men came to 
hear a quiet, never excited voice, which spoke of 
peace and Hght and truth as from some height of 
calm and serene joy — that was all; and as they 
listened they felt their own deep need of just that 
joy and coolness. 

Now, how did the man, John Henry Newman, 
achieve this priceless sway over men's hearts for 
good? 

By being what he was. What was he? Let us 
see. 



Cardinal Newman 27 

One thing is certain; as the concrete founda- 
tion of his character he must have had unyielding 
fixity of purpose. That is the basic fact that under- 
lies all power in character. History is the record 
of the men who had it. Where are the rest? 
Pinches of dust blown ages ago into oblivion! 
Why? Because they did not have it. Like rocks 
that lie in the stream's bed, these forced the cur- 
rents of their times to pass to this side or to that, to 
whirl and eddy around their steadfastness. 

They shaped the water courses. Men with 
immovable ideas, keeping their eye unswervingly 
upon some end ! In small things, as in great, suc- 
cess is his who, while the others like vacillating and 
irresolute vanes blown every which way by shifting 
winds, turn at a moment's notice, holds on tena- 
ciously to his one object! 

Was it not Carlyle who said : "If you see a man 
coming with a fixed idea, dodge him! and if it is 
a woman, pray for salvation"? 

And there is wisdom in the injunction, since 
they alone need cause us the least anxiety. Others 
we may ignore or thwart; these must be reckoned 
with. How strange, how absolutely necessary, is 
what we call influence! By influence I mean that 
power of holding one's mind before another's mind 
and compelling it to think as you do. 



28 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Whenever two minds meet there is, consciously 
or not, immediate trial of strength, the flint in- 
variably cutting into the softer substance. The 
very pertinacity of a book agent, with all its irri- 
tating and intrusive disagreeableness, is yet his 
splendid evidence of sure possession of just that 
something which he needs to reach his purpose. 

"Respice Unemr That motto has the very prin- 
ciple of ultimate success; and, after all, what need 
one care about save ultimates of every sort? The 
good old Irish gentleman to whom I have referred 
asked of his pastor what I had meant by this 
"respice iinem'' and that genial and witty priest 
repHed: ''Oh, he meant that he could see your 
finish!" And, truly, they who consider ends can 
usually ''see the finish" of those who see but that 
which is at hand and different things from day to 
day. In every group of men there are those mighty 
ones around whose fixity of purpose all the rest 
revolve. 

This is true of the family; it is also true of the 
state. That imposing body of great men in the 
nineteenth century whom we now call the "grand 
old men" was composed of those whose tremen- 
dous will power forced from their contemporaries 
a recognition tantamount to subservience. They, 
as it were, made the age what it was. They were 



Cardinal Newman 29 

the embodiment of its aims, its efforts, its hopes 
and aspirations. Their biographies were a suffi- 
cient history of the times. And among them, 
unique in the fact of his antagonism to the general 
drift, towered John Henry Newman. But mere 
strength of will, mere fixity of purpose, was not, in 
his case, sufffcient explanation of the influence he 
wielded. We must take note of one more charac- 
teristic. Above and about his firmness of mind 
there was an atmosphere of spiritual uplift and 
enthusiasm which transfigured his whole being and 
diverted the current of his force of character from 
the channel of self over the wide desert of human 
need and mankind's pathetic lack of light. He 
was a worrier for God — one of those singular and 
desperately needed beings who, while the rest of us 
are too busy, too engrossed, too indifferent, too 
ignorant, to worry over our own necessity, worry 
for us and cease not until, in spite of us, we get 
what we so need. 

The mind runs back with charming fancy to 
that long row of cradles in which those "grand 
old men" lay in their infancy, when the century was 
itself in its cradle. How little could have been then 
foreseen of the future glory and struggle ! Dimpled 
baby fingers clutching the sunbeams, hands after- 
wards to hold the mighty truncheons of world- 



30 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

compelling power! They lay there innocent 
enough of all the stress and agony that were to be. 
Bismarck, Gladstone, Darwin, Tennyson, Leo 
XIIL, Newman! What a world of power sweeps 
into one's thought as the great names are men- 
tioned ! One thinks of the hovering of the angels 
of destiny and of vocation above such cradles. 
And when they came to that in which the puny 
little Newman lay, they must have paused and won- 
dered as to the purposes of God concerning him. 
A mighty head, and seemingly but little else. A 
fragile little lamp of alabaster — just enough of 
body to send a soul in ! But the angel of vocation 
did stoop and whisper to that tiny child. To Bis- 
marck was given the feudal note of absolute in- 
sistence which made him the man of ''blut und 
eisen," whom we all feel, even if we abhor. To 
Tennyson, the golden lyre of kingly and chivalrous 
song, which caused us, in our hurry and our self- 
ishness, yet to remember that Hfe is more than food 
and the body than raiment. To Darwin, the noble 
passion to know. To Gladstone, the magnificent 
enthusiasm of humanity. To Leo, the superb 
ability to guide eternal issues with exquisite appre- 
ciation of the pressure of time. 

And what to Newman? One may imagine Des- 
tiny holding high colloquy with a soul like this: 



Cardinal Newman 31 

"If God shall give to you a pen that shall write 
English in such wise that all must read ; if He shall 
give to you a tongue which shall persuade as none 
has done since Chrysostom; if He shall give to 
you an intellect that, even in an age of intellectual 
giants, shall be thought vast, will you take for your 
life work — make the sole aim and object of your 
being this: to love the Hght and follow it?" 

And, like another Samuel, Newman looked up 
and said: "Lord, here am I; send me!" The 
LIGHT ! That is the meaning of the man. To be 
in absolute good faith ! That was the hunger of 
his soul. 

He seems to have made a covenant with light, 
as though he had said to truth: "Show me thy 
face here, and I will go to thee; there, and I will 
go to thee there; show me thyself anywhere, and 
I will go to thee; yea, though every friend I ever 
had oppose me; though all who ever did me kind- 
ness stand with joined hands, a cordon of protest ; 
though every heart that ever loved me break! I 
shall go through them all to come to truth. If my 
own mother meet me, and with her tear-stained 
face reminds me of the infinite self-sacrifice of her 
whole life, tells me that it will bring her precious 
old gray head in sorrow to the grave, begs me by 
all the pains she bore in bringing me into the world 



32 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

and by the hallowed memories of all she was to me 
in the sweet innocence and sanctities of childhood, 
I shall push even her aside to get to truth; for I 
have made one awful and eternal vow, never to 
sleep until I know that I possess the friendship of 
just two — God and my conscience !" 

Lead, kindly light ! Prayer was summed up for 
this great lover of the light in that one cry. Con- 
science to him was as a priceless gem; to know 
one's way and follow it, life's glorious possibility. 

Such, then, was the man, John Henry Newman. 
And it would seem that he began in earliest infancy 
to manifest the dominant note of love of the truth. 
He was abnormal rather than precocious. Sickly 
and of a shrinking, perhaps even peevish, tempera- 
ment, the little fellow very early found himself 
different from other children, the pathos and mys- 
tery of life pressing upon his thought untimely. 
"I disliked boys and did not know that there were 
girls," he tells us of that first age of his self- 
consciousness. He read, and he remembered. In- 
deed, his memory was seemingly infallible and 
capable of holding (without the scholar's usual 
methods and orderly arrangement) the enormous 
mass of information accumulated during eighty 
years of incessant reading. 

And Truth was his mistress, whose courting was 
the motive for the perusal of every word he read. 



Cardinal Newman 33 

Truth! Historical, doctrinal, moral, social truth. 
To serve her, to win here, to possess ! That was 
the absorbing object, that was the joy of life. 

"Mamma, be accurate; it was quarter to four!" 
Thus he is said to have corrected and amused his 
mother when she had told her visitors that she 
had left for town the previous Thursday at four 
o'clock. 

And upon entering the university, he soon 
achieved a reputation for defending minutest truths 
in a manner which made him less liked than feared. 
''I am afraid," writes his mother, "that our little 
John Henry is going to be a very disagreeable 
child!" To some he did, indeed, prove to be ex- 
tremely so ; but they were those who neither knew 
nor cared to know his Beloved. To Oxford, which 
in the space of half a score of years he was to revo- 
lutionize, he came when he was fourteen years of 
age, looking not more than ten, so feeble was he 
and so innocent. 

Oxford! At the time of Newman's going up 
for his education that venerable seat of learning 
was peacefully slumbering. Within its cool quad- 
rangles there dwelt the culture and scholarship of 
England in a frigid disregard of the unrest and 
agitation of the surrounding world. And there, 
too, all that was finest and purest in the estabhshed 



34 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

church found sanctuary and leisure for undisturbed 
pursuit of knowledge. As though no sin or ig- 
norance or want existed in the land, the cultured 
clergy, morally flawless and aesthetically men of the 
nicest balance, lived out their lives in editing new 
critical recensions of Anacreon or Horace, and in 
the laborious compilation of treatises on the Birds 
of Devonshire or the Varieties of Fungus in the 
West Riding of Yorkshire! Every professor may 
well have been ninety years of age. Not one had 
changed a line in any of his lectures for a genera- 
tion. Without the omission of one subscript iota, 
the venerable old pedants — not to say, fossils — 
were droning away at the same lectures which they 
had delivered to the great grandfathers of their 
present pupils. It would have been thought sac- 
rilege to have plucked off but one small ivy leaf 
from the old college walls. 

And in the country the church was practically 
dead, the rural clergy being largely incumbents of 
old family livings for which a younger son was 
regularly trained as a matter of course. Perched 
in his high "three-decker" pulpit the parson read 
the perfunctory prayers to the antiphon of his deaf 
old parish clerk, the Squire the while peacefully 
snoring in his curtained box pew, and for the con- 
gregation a group of charity children and two old 
maids! The Oxford Movement was to change all 



Cardinal Newman 35 

this, but as yet the subtle beginnings of that great 
awakening were scarcely felt. To Oxford, then, 
came he who was to light again the sanctuary lamp 
in the empty and cold shrine of England's faith. 

How little did the old university know who and 
what that timid, pale-faced boy was who found his 
way up the High street on a certain day ! 

Young Newman's first days at Oxford were in 
no way distinguished, and but for the providence 
of God, he, too, might soon have been devoting 
his splendid mind to original studies in Numis- 
matics or to the Entomology of Shropshire. But 
mighty forces had been at work. Sir Walter Scott, 
the stout knight errant of romance and action, had 
charged through the paralyzing classicism of the 
eighteenth century and shown the modern mind 
the glory and the elevation of the antique world. 
Wordsworth and his gentle brothers, ''the Lake 
school" of poets, were leading the imagination 
from the stilted artificiality of "Olympus" to the 
brave simplicity of open fields and wind-swept 
downs — daring to sing of Mary and of Lucy in 
place of Daphne, Phyllis and Areadne. The meta- 
physics of Coleridge and the nascent promptings 
of the "pre-Raphaelite" art ethics ; the fervent pro- 
tests of a dissent which, with whatever vulgarity 
and lack of coherence, had none the less heart and 



36 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

reality; the new-born passion for historical, anti- 
quarian and literary accuracy — all these and other 
forces had been preparing the better elements in 
the estabHshment for a change of heart. 

And God had been preparing the mighty soul 
of Newman for the work. The young poet and 
seer found himself soon a welcome recruit in a little 
group of quiet, unobtrusive fellows of various 
houses of the university, to whom the sacred call- 
ing of the ministry meant more than leisure for 
merely scholarly pursuits. Alen these were with 
true enthusiasm for man. Men of superb scholar- 
ship and with a real scholar's veneration for the 
truth and a gentleman's humility of heart. Among 
these profound students and lofty souls Newman 
soon came to hold a singular, and then a command- 
ing, place. For the first time since the Reforma- 
tion the finality and propriety of that moral and 
doctrinal cataclysm began to be seriously ques- 
tioned, as a result of the exhaustive study of the 
great writings of the early Fathers of the Church. 
Christianity as a fact of history, the church as a 
living organism, as a divinely instituted and infal- 
lible body, began to displace the sentimental, 
vague, subjective conceptions which had been 
thought a sufficient idea of the effect of the Incar- 
nation. 



Cardinal Newman 37 

And as they read the Fathers, discovering their 
CathoHcity, they studied art and architecture and 
music and philosophy ; and before the fire of beauty 
which such studies kindled the intellectual vulgarity 
of Protestantism and the mawkishness of dissent 
went down like stubble. 

Others there were among these Oxford "Trac- 
tarians," as they were called, whose learning was 
as great, others whose zeal was as his own; but 
none of them equaled Newman in some magnificent 
respects. 

None had Newman's imagination. There may 
have been profounder theologians, but no eye saw 
the inner glory of theological truths as his eye did ; 
there may have been better equipped historians 
among them, but no heart leaped forth to reha- 
bilitate lost and forgotten beauty as did his poet's 
heart; there doubtless were among these scholars 
men whose knowledge of liturgies, architecture, 
art, surpassed his own, but there was none who 
felt all that he felt when, seated in the ruins of some 
old priory or minster, he heard once more the 
chanting of the monks and saw again the stately 
ceremonial that testified to truth. 

Some could take purely academic pleasure in 
the pathetic story of England's loss of the ancient 
faith, and some could be content with scholarly 



38 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

regret at the emaciated state of England's present 
church: but to John Henry Newman the desola- 
tion round him was a call to act ; the vision of the 
Bride in her once glorious raiment made it impos- 
sible for him to think of her remaining in rags and 
shame! He sprang, like a Crusader, to right the 
wrong and to drive forth the sacrilegious money- 
changers from the house of God. And soon he was 
the towering spirit in the despised religious move- 
ment that has completely changed the character of 
the established church. It were beside our present 
purpose to trace the steps of the great leader as 
he advanced from point to point in the inevitable 
road toward Rome. At twenty-seven he was the 
rector of the university church of St. Mary the 
Virgin, in the pulpit of which he preached, as Mr. 
Gladstone said, "to the combined intellect of the 
British empire." 

Higher and higher soared his sweet soul, and 
deeper and deeper grew his grasp on the souls of 
others. Then, when the High-Church party had 
practically silenced the opposition (composed of 
British pig-headedness, middle-class no-poperyism 
and clerical inertia and snobbishness) — when New- 
man might have entered upon a career of boundless 
influence as admittedly the greatest intellect and 
loftiest thinker of his time, he staggered the minds 



Cardinal Newman 39 

of men, broke the hearts of those whom he rever- 
enced, practically admitted the charge of his ene- 
mies from the first, — that the movement was Rome- 
ward in its aim, — and, in the view of his best friends, 
"committed intellectual suicide" by submitting to 
the Catholic church ! The moral splendor of such a 
step by such a man at such a time was, of course, 
not thought of; no, no! From John o' Groat's 
House to Land's End every pulpit in the country 
poured terrible denunciations upon the head of 
him whom yesterday they had called saint and 
scholar. "Judas Iscariot," "traitor," "Jesuit in dis- 
guise," "blind leader of the blind." Nothing was 
thought too coarse or brutal to say of the "pervert" 
who had actually submitted to logic, history, con- 
science, God! 

He answered not. Then sped the quiet years, 
and by degrees men came to look, from time to 
time, for utterances from Cardinal Newman which 
were invariably pitched in a gentle, minor key, and 
thus it came to pass that the venerable oratorian 
attained a place in the affections of the good, the 
learned and the just, unique and hallowed. 

Like the silvery voice of a boy that floats down 
from the high loft of some dark cathedral upon 
the bowed and troubled multitude of worshippers 
below ; like pearls that patter upon a silver platter ; 



40 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

like news from home when one is far away; like 
that which lights the darkness of the here and now 
with reminiscence of the peace that was, or proph- 
ecies of that which is to be — like this did Newman's 
influence become. 

As in so many others, his picture hangs in my 
house, with its sublime appeal to look, whatever the 
stress and storm, only and always for the Kindly 
Light, having caught sight of which, to count all 
other loss but gain. And by the side of Newman's 
picture I have hung that of an old Franciscan 
monk, sitting as cool as a cucumber under the 
shade of an Italian cloister, playing upon his violin 
the solemn sweetness of an ''Andante Consolante." 
He has his back turned to the glaring light. And, 
after his siesta — for his own comfort as for God's 
greater glory — he bows away upon his fiddle there, 
finding his gentle way along the mystic green lanes 
of the music to those deep meadows, bathed in 
summer seas, where joy and peace are flowers, and 
where the very air is rest. 

Without the cloister in the picture one sees that 
the day is hot. Men must be sweating in the vine- 
yards yonder, and in the burning sun the hurnming 
insects swarm in irritating clouds. And on beyond, 
upon the hillside, the city lies whose streets must 
be like ovens. The world a parched and trackless 



Cardinal Newman 41 

desert, where men strive to reach their mirage- 
ends ; and where the old religious sits, a cool oasis, 
where neither houses are, nor power, nor money, 
but water and rest and quiet ! 

Along the dusty, blistered highroad a tall girl 
dressed in black has evidently hurried, fleeing from 
grief or despair or shame, and as she was about to 
pass the monastery gate she heard the exquisite, 
slow music of the old monk's Andante. The pic- 
ture shows her leaning upon the door-post, Hsten- 
ing. The monk plays on in ignorance of the poor 
girl's presence, the throbbing stately notes swelling 
forth gloriously, although he does not know that 
any human heart is within reach of the benediction. 

On, on, on, surge the pleading notes, until their 
prayer is answered and tears of hope and rapture 
baptize the anguish from the woman's face. That 
picture I have hung near Newman's because I think 
it very beautifully pictures him in allegory. New- 
man was in the shadow of a cloister all his life — the 
cloister of a recollected and calm spirit to whom 
it seemed that prayer and elevation were but the 
normal state. 

He also had his back turned to the world of 
glare and strenuous striving for all that perisheth. 
Spiritually he seemed to have dwelt in that far land 
''where it is always afternoon." Refreshed by the 



42 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

siesta of constant practice of the presence of God, 
the lengthening shadows found him playing a low 
Andante Consolante which the whole world loves. 
The world — the tall girl dressed in black, hur- 
rying along the bleak campagnia of its doubt and 
hunger ! Harassed, bewildered, restless and utterly 
worn out! Fleeing it scarcely knows from what, 
nor at all whither. Escaping if it can from its own 
fever. Struggling like maddened Titans to get 
that which it knows beforehand it does not want! 
This poor on-rushing and distracted world is paus- 
ing now as it had not done for many centuries, 
beside the portals of the old "Cloister by the Way- 
side" — the church of the living God. Beside the 
portal, not as yet, perhaps, wishing to enter in. 
But it is much that now so many stop to hear, if 
only as they pass, the music nowhere to be heard 
but there. And more than to all other reasons for 
this refreshing fact we must look to Newman. 
Men have heard his violin, and, though they knew 
that he was playing in a despised and much sus- 
pected and mysterious enclosure, there was no 
doubting that the notes he played went straight 
into their broken and anxious hearts. Multitudes 
heard and finally went in to share with him the 
peace past understanding. Still greater numbers 
listen and wait, not yet aware of the stupendous 
fact that the ineffably entrancing music is not a 



Cardinal Newman 43 

merely mystical suggestion of what might be, but 
is the very living voice of one who is that peace 
and rest and joy for which the echoing memories 
and haunting cries of the human soul prove that 
man was made. Yes, it does seem that Cardinal 
Newman bore to the world precisely this attitude 
of my old monk in the picture. Manning fought 
for great causes, out in the heat and dust of men's 
hot midday labors. Newman awaited their return- 
ing to their homes, tired out, and talked with them, 
in the sweet eventide, of many things for which 
there had not been found time during the day. 

And then at last there came the peaceful even- 
tide of his own life. The tranquil preparation for 
the glad journey home. The last mass that he 
said, the last confession that he heard. The quiet 
waiting to be allowed to see his Beloved whom he 
had served so long and so joyously. 

Fancy, toward the end, their handing him his 
dear old violin, too heavy now for the poor, dying 
knotted fingers even to hold. But as the weird 
fifths of the strings woke into utterance the dying 
ears heard the familiar tones, and, opening his 
great, deep eyes, he looked from one loved face 
to another, and a smile played about the gentle lips 
that never had in all his ninety-one long years been 
shaped save to speak love and truth. Tears welled 



44 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

up from the depths — the tears as of a little child 
— and trickled down the wrinkled face until they 
met the smile, and ceased. Then he spoke his last 
words on this earth. Note how supremely beau- 
tiful, how of his very heart they were. He said : 

''I hear music and I see the light !" In a 
moment he had passed to where, beyond these 
voices, there is peace. 

The Andante Consolante of his life was finished. 
What was it? It had begun in childhood, and 
ended not until he lay down to rest eternally. It 
ran like the dominant through the whole chord 
of his character and work. It crystallizes himself. 
Hear it, and hope thou, also ! 

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, 

Lead thou me on. 
The night is dark and I am far from home, 

Lead thou me on. 
Keep thou my feet, I do not ask to see the distant scene. 

One step enough for me. 

When the transcendent moment toward which 
we are advancing shall be at hand, may we, too, 
hear the music and see the light ! 



'(^:^^^'^^^^^ 



ileo flit. 







MiMiiiMiiiiMiiii^ 



LEO XIII. 



AMONG the most vivid recollections of my 
youth is that of a conversation I had one 
day with an old gentleman, to whom may the Lord 
send rest. 

We were walking down the principal street of 
the city ever to me the dearest, when, chancing 
to glance through a side street, I saw the colon- 
nade and pediment of an old church heavily draped 
with black. 

On asking my old friend the reason, he told me 
that the Pope was dead, and added, ''There never 
will be another Pope !" We fell to talking of the 
Papacy, and, if my memory serves me, that was the 
first time that I had ever thought of the Sovereign 
Pontiff as a real being. 

And I remember with what cheerfulness I heard 
the dear old fellow prove that with Pius IX. the 
Papacy had virtually passed away forever. 

True, they would brick up their Eminences of 
the Sacred College ; the most minute details of the 



48 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

antique red-tape of an election would be observed ; 
a Pope would be proclaimed, and some poor mil- 
lions of men,' still trammeled by tradition or 
swayed by interest, would kiss his slipper. But the 
wretched prisoner in the Vatican, shorn of his last 
vestige of power — a paralytic squarely in the path 
of progress that would not be resisted — why, such 
a Pope would be no more than a thin ghost of what 
the Pope had been to earlier and less enlightened 
times. 

And, as the gods make mad those whom they 
w^ould destroy, one might expect the early disso- 
lution of him Avho, in the broad noon-day of nine- 
teenth century reason, had flung the inconceivable 
impertinence of his preposterous claim of being 
infallible flat in the face of light ! 

Under the weight of that ''absurdity," and as 
against the irresistible on-rush of ''education" and 
"liberal" thought, truly the Papacy must, to all 
eyes save to the eye of faith, have borne most 
certain marks of speedy death. There was, how- 
ever, an election ; a new Pope was proclaimed, and 
now for over a quarter of a century the Chair of 
Peter has been serenely occupied by the first Pope 
who had to reign bereft of temporal power and to 
support the onus of infallibility — the Pope who 
was to be the mere ghost of his proud predecessors* 
authority, and the beginning of the inevitable end ! 



Leo XIII. 49 

Who is this man? Leo XIIL, the broadest- 
minded and most beloved of men, the Holy Father 
who holds within the splendid sweep of his benefi- 
cent and elevating influence more of the sons of 
men than any Pope from Peter's time to ours! 
Leo, to whom the world, within the church and 
out, bows in affectionate, unfeigned respect, and 
who has made the oldest sovereignty in Europe 
(stripped, too, of all its earthly power) more potent 
in the development of the world's destiny than all 
the rest, young though they be and able to enforce 
their will with standing armies. 

It were no waste of time to think of such a man. 
Let us (io so. The Papacy stands out in history 
the most sublime and constant evidence that God's 
ways are not as our ways nor his thoughts as our 
thoughts. Time after time it has seemed to the 
contemporary mind either to hesitate to do the 
desperately needed and diplomatic thing, or else 
to do that which no mere human policy could pos- 
sibly approve. Supremely fitting opportunity for 
the impressive achievement of some of its con- 
fessed ends is suffered apparently to pass ; and then 
at some most fatally inopportune and dangerous 
crisis the Papacy acts. A splendid situation arises 
on which the dramatist, with such a denouement 
as Papal domination in view, would surely seize. 



50 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

and Rome ignores it. Again, when one would 
deem the temper of the world to be the very worst, 
when circumstances and events have shaped them- 
selves in such a way as to preclude all hope of a 
successful outcome, Rome undertakes some policy 
or act of subhme audacity, calmly indifferent to 
the dictates of ordinary prudence as well as to the 
outbursts of powerful opposition with which she 
may be threatened. 

For example, take this definition of Infallibility, 
of which we are now thinking. A score of times 
it would have been at the same moment more feas- 
ible and more dramatically likely of acceptation. 
Immediately after the awful attestation of Heaven's 
authorization, on the day of Pentecost, when the 
Apostles, filled with the Holy Ghost, might have 
expected the certain ''Credo" to come spontane- 
ously from all the faithful upon their promulga- 
tion of any doctrine, however vast in its demand 
upon the intellect. 

Or when, after some centuries of almost unseen 
life in catacombs of abject poverty and under the 
contemptuous indifference of pagan power, the 
Church came forth into the intellectual and the 
political, no less than the spiritual, world as a 
triumphant force which must be reckoned with; 
when those gigantic early Leos and Gregories and 
Bonifaces sat on the Chair of Peter. 



Leo XIII. 51 

Or later, when she who had alone been able to 
meet the torrent of invasion from the North, and 
to survive the cataclysms subsequent to the final 
overthrow of the vast fabric of the old Roman 
Empire ; when she, the Church of the new spiritual 
Rome, had come to be the center of all authority 
in everything pertaining to the new civilization 
and Popes were actually dispensing the crowns of 
Europe to monarchs who were their subjects. 

When in the rigors of mid-winter an emperor 
walks bare-foot to Canosa to beg to be restored 
to Papal favor; or, later yet, when, at the zenith 
of the Renaissance, the splendors of the "golden 
pontificate" of Leo X. drew to the Papal court the 
scholarship, the art, the culture and the magnifi- 
cence of the whole world. 

Surely, at any one of those great hours of 
triumph or vital crises safely passed the dramatist 
and the diplomatist would tell us the Fisherman 
beside the Tiber must needs do what he would if 
he were ever to expect to catch men and persuade 
them to believe that he, a man just Hke themselves, 
was, in the most eternally important matters of the 
soul, infallible. But no. One after another of these 
supremely adventitious opportunities is lost, one 
''psychological moment" after another passes away 
unused. 



52 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

The ages of faith begin to give way ominously 
to those of "reason," and yet Rome speaks not. 
The Reformation Avrenches whole kingdoms from 
her grasp, and still the Church speaks not. The 
paralyzing classicism of the next age, together with 
the growing spirit of atheistic thought, tend more 
and more to show that it must very soon be all too 
late to hope for any other hour so opportune, and 
still the Church holds peace. And then, when the 
agnostic, speculative skepticism of the nineteenth 
century had dealt its staggering blow; when the 
political upheavals had alienated her last ally; 
when Garibaldian sophistry and Napoleonic treach- 
ery had brought about the wresting away of her 
temporal power; when the humiliating sacrilege 
was culminating, and the dread armies of the Sa- 
voyard were battering down the walls of Rome — 
then, oh, ye powers, then does the voice ring out, 
and Pius IX. proclaims himself infallible. Small 
wonder that my good old friend and miUions of the 
wise declared that that must mean the end. But 
those who had ears not entirely deaf to sounds 
above the earth might have thought it significant 
that from one end of Christendom to the other 
there rose the answering "Credo" from those "fool- 
ish" ones with whom God not infrequently con- 
founds the "wise." 



Leo XIII. 53 

And in a few brief years the good, brave Pius 
dies, and Leo is called of God to rule the church 
in these so perilous times. 

The quaint old prophecy of the good monk 
Malachy was never fulfilled better than by the pres- 
ent Pontiff. As is well known, this prophecy, made 
long ago, foretells the mystic name of each suc- 
ceeding Pope, and the symbolic name which the 
immediate successor of Pius IX. was to be known 
by was "Lumen de Coelo" — a light that is from 
heaven. A light. An intellectual light so bright 
and a mind so luminous that the whole world has 
come to think of Leo XIII. as one of the greatest 
thinkers of our age. 

There have been many kinds of Popes, for 
Popes are men, and men are different one from 
another. And there might thus have been selected 
a man who might have been remembered for his 
scholarship, his zeal, his devotion to archaeology, 
Roman antiquities, or for a new and very critical 
edition of St. Policarp's works. 

A man might have been selected because of his 
great personal sanctity, and he might have ruled 
the. church in negative security from error, but 
wholly aloof from the tremendous movements of 
the world around her. In short, a Pope might 
well have been elected who would have been as 



54 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

much at home in the remotest ages as today; but 
the choice fell upon Leo, and no man in the world 
is more a man of here and now, no other man has 
shown the grasp on current questions that Leo has, 
and there is no one more truly and effectively inter- 
ested in the affairs of men and the mighty aspira- 
tions of the modern mind than he. In a very 
splendid sense he is "Lumen de Coelo" — a light 
from heaven that illuminates all questions upon 
which it falls and which sees to it that no question 
of world import shall escape its penetrating rays. 

Such, then, is the man whom the Holy Ghost 
has placed upon the Chair of Peter in these troub- 
lous times, and who, though bereft of the temporal 
power of his predecessors and surrounded by a 
world flushed with the new wine of the agnostic, 
scientific skepticism, has compelled all thinking 
men to recognize his intellectual and spiritual 
greatness. 

Let us examine, then, the world in which this 
mighty personahty has moved with such impressive 
and elevating force. 

The last half of the nineteenth century will be 
remembered because of certain sweeping changes 
that took place in the aspect and the conditions of 
more than one department of human life. 

Gigantic forces were at work which have left 
the world in a very altered state ; and, of course, the 



Leo XIII. 55 

church finds herself confronted by problems the 
solution of which is the paramount duty of the day. 

First of all, the enormous enlargement of man's 
knowledge brought upon education the strain of 
a tremendous necessity to adapt its methods, mat- 
ter and scope to the new conditions. 

And with an enthusiasm sometimes greater 
than its prudence, education has addressed itself 
to the great task. It is an era in which the school- 
master is supreme. And this educational advance 
carries with it a most searching spirit of inquiry 
which has invaded all fields of learning, resulting 
in some cases in the complete overthrow of the 
established ideas of yesterday. Political economy 
and history have practically been re-written ; while 
the immense field of philosophy has been traversed 
with a freedom, not to say audacity, that has 
shaken all foundations save those alone which rest 
upon the eternal. ; 

The relations of men to each other, the authen- 
ticity of Holy Scripture, the results of modern 
thought upon the doctrinal teaching of the several 
religious bodies, the industrial drift and its conse- 
quences, the imposing possibilities of America's 
future and the significant disturbances in the far 
East — in short, all of the great questions that have 
absorbed the minds of thinkers in this hour of 



56 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

world-wide agitation, have come within the purview 
of Leo XIII. , and have felt the force of his mind. 

The mind of a Pope is expressed in many ways. 
There is his control of the general policy of the 
Vatican in the political and diplomatic world ; then 
there is the reflex of his opinion in the countless 
lesser matters — of the appointment of bishops, 
decision of cases, settlement of disputes, etc., etc., 
etc. ; but better than all of these, can be taken as an 
evidence of the Pontiff's personal characteristics, 
the tone and subject-matter of his various encyc- 
licals. An encyclical is simply a letter from the 
Pope to the faithful upon some topic of current 
interest. And these letters of Leo, covering almost 
the whole field of modern thought and tend- 
ency, prove him to be keenly aware of the tremen- 
dous meaning of the hour, and that he himself is the 
man of all men for the hour. The man and the 
hour — let us look at them. 

I. Education in its broadest and loftiest sense 
has had in Leo a champion fearless and enthusi- 
astic. His letters come back, time after time, to 
the fundamental necessity of increasing the number 
and the efficiency of Christian schools, and the 
various religious orders devoted to teaching have 
enjoyed the assistance of his persistent pressure 
upon the conscience of the world of this duty, 
always important, but absolutely paramount today. 



Leo XIII. 57 

Leo is a profound believer in printers' ink. The 
power of the press has not escaped that searching 
eye of his, and he has stood back of the humblest 
editor and writer breathing inspiration and encour- 
agement. 

Truth societies and other agencies for the wide 
dissemination of information upon the principles of 
the faith have sprung into existence and flourish 
under his fostering care; and the universities and 
schools over which the church watches have been 
brought abreast of the most advanced, even in 
those departments of purely material sciences, in 
which one might suppose that a spiritual mother 
would least be interested. 

Against ignorance of every sort Leo declared 
and waged incessant war. When the refreshing 
manifestation of a determination on the part of 
historical students was made, that scholarship was 
at last going to bid defiance to prejudice, and his- 
tory re-written in accordance with the facts as they 
might be found, Leo, by a magnificent (though 
scarcely theological) exercise of the "power of the 
keys," decided to throw open the archives of the 
Vatican to the scholars of the world. 

Note just what that momentous event means. 
The Papal archives are probably the richest mine 
of historical documents and other antique sources 



58 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

in the world. Among its treasures are to be found 
records of priceless value to the historian nowhere 
else existing. And, of course, it was universally 
supposed that amid those evidences of mediaeval 
and ancient times, could one but get at them, there 
might be found much that would tend to scandalize 
the modern sentimentalist, if not to seriously affect 
the present Roman claims. Those silent tombs of 
story, what might they not contain? What sicken- 
ing traces of the "human element" in those old- 
world Popes and clergy. What ghastly corpses 
of long buried truths. Thus did the horde of 
modern ''scholars" love to frighten one another as 
children with their terrifying tales of "things" they 
see at night. Imagine, therefore, the moral, the 
dramatic and magnificent effect of the broad, char- 
acteristic action of our glorious Pontiff. Taking 
the rusty keys of his supreme authority, he turned 
the light of day into those dark old archives, and, 
bidding the scholars of the whole world enter, 
invited them to search and delve, collate and 
arrange, print, publish! Anything! Fancy the 
influence, upon the breastworks of stupid bigotry, 
of Leo calling to him all the men of learning 
and asking them to dig down deep into the records 
of the past, and then to give their findings to the 
world. "We want," said he, "the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth." 



Leo XIII. 59 

And while this amazing revelation — of Leo's 
greatness and some men's foolishness — was being 
made in the Pope's dark '^cellar," an equally sig- 
nificant development was quietly transpiring upon 
his roof. 

The Vatican observatory has come to be re- 
garded among the most important, especially 
because of its extremely valuable series of celestial 
photographs. Night after night the great plates 
there receive the picture of the sky, it being well 
known that light so faint as to escape not the mere 
human eye alone, but telescopes as well, is caught 
upon the very sensitive and patient plates. Thus 
from the roof the Pope is gathering together the 
silent story of the works of God in far-off space as 
in the archives down below has slowly been col- 
lected the still more glorious story of His works 
of grace. 

An amusing incident illustrates the sprightly 
"up-to-dateness" of the great Leo. A year or two 
ago, to the wonder of men, upon a certain night 
there suddenly appeared in the constellation Per- 
seus a brilliant fixed star of the first magnitude. 
So glorious an arrival, of course, filled the astron- 
omers with thrilling interest, and the telegraph 
sent the startling news from one observatory to 
another around the earth. 



6o Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

A new great sun had taken its stand amid its 
myriad sisters, doubtless to burn there until the 
consummation of the present order. 

No similar event had ever taken place. Here, 
truly, was a sublime and awful manifestation of the 
immensity of space and of the possibilities of future 
firmarrients. With what relish must the sweeping- 
tubes have turned to the indicated point to wel- 
come the magnificent newcomer. 

Told of whatever happens of unusual interest, 
the Holy Father was informed of the appearance 
of the great new star, and he immediately said that 
they would probably find its photograph taken 
some time before the eye of its discoverer had 
Hghted on it. And sure enough, there, on the roof 
of the Pope's house, they found a distinct photo- 
graph of the recent comer, anticipating its discov- 
ery by a considerable period. 

Much of the wisdom of the world might sim- 
ilarly be found anticipated by Leo's genius, could 
one but get his profound "negatives" developed. 

By a succession of timely and optimistic utter- 
ances the head of the church on earth has won the 
confidence and heartfelt co-operation of powerful 
interests hitherto antagonistic or indifferent to 
reHgion. 

And when he speaks men feel that fundamental 
truths are being grappled by a mind that neither 



Leo XIII. 6i 

hesitates nor fears. The guardian of truth, as it 
was from eternity, he sleeps not as he draws Time 
within its power. 

II. If the age Avitnessed a great advance along 
all intellectual lines, it was in the domain of polit- 
ical economy and social philosophy that the most 
pronounced and profound changes took place. 

Like a giant awakening to a sense of his own 
strength, labor began to comprehend its vital rela- 
tion to capital, and there were not wanting those 
who stood ready to guide the working masses to 
the point of demanding their rights at any cost and 
by any means. 

Only the ignorant or selfish could, at a time 
like ours, remain indifferent to the vast question of 
industrial conditions. The greatest intellects have 
been devoting themselves to the solution of it. 
Philanthropy, poHtics and patriotism alike demand 
that one do what he can to lend the weight of his 
opinion and his aims to the right side of the increas- 
ingly important issues. And to the task of clearly 
stating the relation of the church (considered as 
the custodian of the eternal principles of justice) to 
the whole question of society and the deep, com- 
plex problems that underlie it Leo has brought the 
brilHant powers of his large mind and the gracious 
qualities of his gentle heart. 



62 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

And it is much that there is one who can, by 
reason of great intellectual parts, discuss these vital 
world-themes from a view-point so utterly above 
the world as to secure for his opinions the sanction 
of the certainty that he, for one, does speak as seek- 
ing absolutely nothing but the right. What other 
voice is there that has quite such a ring of real 
disinterestedness? Were Leo merely clothed with 
the unique and isolated powers inhering in the 
Papacy itself, that would alone suffice to make his 
views important in men's eyes as being those of 
one more likely than all others to take a stand 
related to the whole and not to a part simply (since 
to the Pope alone does every portion of humanity 
look as to a father) ; but in his case there is the 
added weight of powers purely personal, which, 
were he not Pope, would make him felt by the 
whole world. 

The combination of personal and of official 
powers of such immense importance results in a 
world-force that has placed Leo XIII. in a position 
to wield an influence at once both wide and splen- 
did. 

And he has exercised it gloriously. His several 
utterances upon the labor question, especially his 
famous first encycUcal upon the subject, brought 
him into the very front in the discussion. 



Leo XIII. 63 

Keenly alive to the great progress that man is 
making toward that democracy which, in the last 
analysis, alone can claim to be consistently and 
logically derived from Christian ethics, our present 
Holy Father has come to be regarded as the most 
cordial friend and bravest champion that the great 
masses of mankind now have. Within the view of 
this old man there rises in the future a vast new 
social status, in which the individual shall come at 
last to his full rights, and universal brotherhood, 
resting upon the principles of justice and humanity 
taught by the Son of Man, shall bring the king- 
doms of this world into the Kingdom of our God 
and of his Christ. Ardent as are his sympathies and 
strong his utterances, Leo has the immense advan- 
tage of seeing all things in the safe, modifying 
perspective of eternity, securing the heart from 
haste and all unnecessary scandal and setting the 
vigorous restraints of fixed, unyielding principles 
about the gates of impulse and of — possibly right- 
eous — passion. And with it all the man himself 
is found by all who come into his august presence 
as simple as a child, a brother to the humblest. 

III. Another of the most noticeable changes 
wrought in these days of radical and sweeping 
readjustment is the abandonment by multitudes of 
so-called Christians of a belief in the authority and 



64 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

authenticity of Holy Scripture. Every denomina- 
tion of non-Catholics has been affected by the 
imposing strength and intellectual brilliancy of the 
new school of ''liberal" theologians and writers, 
who now would seem to have attained a place of 
such commanding influence that it must surely be 
a question of "how long?" before the Bible shall 
have been practically relegated to a mere place of 
more or less antique and literary interest among 
the other "sacred writings." The irony of fate, 
indeed, is this, that the rebellion by Protestantism 
against the Church, one of the leading motives of 
which was the desire to place the Bible in the 
people's hands, should end in a rejection by these 
same Protestants of all the supernatural claims of 
the same Bible. "The Bible and the Bible only the 
rehgion of Protestants," was, not so long ago, the 
rallying cry as against the alleged indifference of 
the "unscriptural" old Church of Rome. And now 
behold! The very foremost and most learned and 
forceful ministers of all the great divisions of Prot- 
estantism rushing into geology, philology, paleon- 
tology, biology, and any other science in quest of 
arguments against the veracity and credibility of 
Holy Writ. And, on the other hand, the old 
"unscriptural" Church of sacerdotal. Popish, medi- 
aeval superstitions, standing with drawn sword to 



LeoXIII. 65 

guard the sacred book. Surely, here is a theme 
for angels and men to ponder, not to say weep, 
over. The storm center of heresy will for some 
time be found in and about this question of Holy 
Scripture. 

And from his watch-tower of sleepless vigil 
Leo has seen the gathering of ominous clouds that 
threaten to obscure the radiance of the eternal 
word. 

Mark, now, how characteristic has been the 
attitude and policy of the serene old Pontifif in 
facing this new enemy. ''Lumen de Coelo" once 
more sublimely acts his prophetic role. Bringing 
to bear the utmost force of his encouragement, and 
by explicit orders to those who have the practical 
control of the trend of study, Leo has seen to it 
that no department in the wide range of biblical 
research and all its allied kindred subjects shall fail 
to have the attention of the great scholars who also 
hold the faith. The result has been that deep, 
growing interest has been aroused in all the uni- 
versities, and Catholic names adorn the various 
fields included in the general study of Holy Scrip- 
ture, these men of belief proving by their admittedly 
great contributions to the subject that they are also 
men of brains and scholarship. The Pope's encyc- 
Hcal on Holy Scripture is a most trenchant, lucid 



66 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

and telling instrument, ringing from end to end 
with that refreshing note of timeliness, safeguarded 
by eternalness, that gives to all of Leo's words their 
charm and glow. 

What an awakening that is to be, when dear, old 
pious souls in the various denominations come to 
realize that their own ministers no longer believe in 
the Bible ; and that, if they are to hear the glorious 
old truths which it contains and about which cluster 
all that is sacred in the memories and aspirations 
and struggles of life, they must betake themselves 
to that maligned old Church which, in their inno- 
cence, they had been led to think was the one enemy 
of the beloved Bible. 

Yes, let the faithful thank God daily that Leo 
sits upon the Papal throne at such a time as this; 
for he completely enters into the attitude of those 
outside the Church and couches his great words in 
such a way as to secure attention and to reassure. 

What somebody has called "a Bible Pope" may 
cause a Catholic to smile, but to have got non- 
Catholics to think of any Pope as "Scripturar' is 
a delicious triumph of far-seeing wisdom ; nor does 
its humor measure its whole importance, either, for, 
as the wrecking of their former theories proceeds, 
the earnest ones will recognize his voice at once 
who speaks the eternal verities in terms of Holy 



Leo XIII. 67 

Writ, whose old familiar similes and parables and 
stories and very phrases are now become part of 
the moral tissue of their serious life. The Catholic 
theologian knows that the claims of holy mother 
Church do not depend on Scripture for either their 
binding force or their historical proofs; but, none 
the less, the astute apologist for CathoUcity, in face 
of such an ^'enemy" as modern Protestantism, will 
scarcely overrate the value of that irrefragible line 
of arguments for the divinity of our religion which 
can be drawn from the Bible. 

If one whom I would fain convince is ready to 
accept the credibility of one, but not of others of 
my witnesses, it is the part of wisdom to lay especial 
emphasis on that more likely testimony — even if 
at the time I know that the objection to all my 
other evidence is quite illogical and childish. This 
wisdom we must respectfully attribute to Leo XIII. 

Some of his words on Holy Scripture might 
have been written by an old-fashioned, orthodox 
minister in a Connecticut hill town. 

The manner of the present Pope attracts the 
non-Catholic heart, and thus his matter comes in 
the way of getting, at the least, a hearing. 

Within the church as well, the influence of his 
enthusiasm has been felt deeply, as evidenced by 
the establishment of more advanced and scientific 



68 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

courses of biblical study in Catholic universities. 
Here in our own land we have been recently hon- 
ored by the selection by the Pope of one of the 
learned professors of the Catholic University at 
Washington to act on the great commission which 
was appointed by the Vatican to make an exhaust- 
ive study of the whole field of Scripture. The 
faithful may expect in the report of this commis- 
sion, when it is finally presented, the most complete 
survey of what the scholarship of the whole world 
has achieved thus far in that most vitally important 
department of research. 

We have now considered the Holy Father in the 
three aspects of his cordial and very timely relation 
to (i) the scientific and educational movement; 
(2) the political and social movement; and (3) the 
advanced study of the Holy Scriptures. In each 
of these he stands forth easily the most important 
and weighty force in the world, and it would be 
impossible to over-estimate the influence upon the 
church, mankind and the future, of the fact that, 
in a period of fundamental unrest and radical trans- 
ition, the head of Christendom was in so powerful 
a way a man of such superb appreciation of condi- 
tions, and withal a man of such electrifying optim- 
ism. 



Leo XIII. 69 

Such, then, was the hour — and the man was 
equal to the hour. The personahty of such a figure 
in the world's drama becomes extremely interest- 
ing. Leo is no exception. Conceive a frail and 
bent old man, resembling a spiritual, other-worldly 
soul, rather than a being of flesh and blood. An 
eye that pierces the very heart, and yet that kindles 
with love and sympathy. A mind keen, active, 
immense in comprehension and scope, a memory 
tenacious and a voice persuasive and never to be 
forgotten. Think of the march of events of which 
Leo has been an eager and analytical observer. 
He was a man of fifty when our Civil War was 
raging. The war with Mexico, the French Revo- 
lution of '48, the Crimean War, the Oxford Move- 
ment took place not before the brilliant Monsignor 
Pecci was known in the ecclesiastical and diplo- 
matic worlds as an astute and charming personage 
of importance. And the tremendous changes of 
the last half century have passed before the view 
of Leo's mind as of one who had a vital part to 
play in the grand action, and who could from 
personal observation throw every detail of the 
crowding scenes into the illuminating perspective 
of fifty, sixty, seventy, previous years of intimate 
acquaintance with men and measures. 

The trusted nuncio at European courts, young 
Pecci came into touch with policies, ^ plots, ambi- 



70 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

tions, diplomatic schemes, vast programmes, when 
most young men are but beginning to lay the timid 
first foundations of a career. He has beheld the 
passing away of every great figure from the stage 
of life who played a master part when he, a rising 
cardinal, was in the very prime of middle age. The 
present men of prominence in Europe were yet 
unborn or mere schoolboys when Leo was an 
ecclesiastic of growing influence with a quarter of 
a century of priesthood behind him. 

Affable, witty, of finest literary tastes, we are 
informed that to have known the present Pontiff 
when he was but a cardinal was to have known one 
of the most engaging men of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. 

And even since his elevation to his august 
position in the Vicariate of Jesus Christ on earth, 
pilgrims bring from those brief and priceless 
moments spent in his presence the story of the 
winsome sweetness and captivating interest in one's 
own land, hopes, life, which Leo manifests to all 
who visit him. 

And, above all, Americans are filled with won- 
der, gratitude and enthusiasm on witnessing the 
Holy Father's marvelous familiarity with even the 
details of our national peculiarities and institutions. 

The President's little son falls dangerously ill, 
and Leo cables a tender message of sympathy and 



Leo XIII. 71 

of inquiry to the anxious parents, the White House 
and the Vatican being by just that bit of human 
kindliness brought closer to each other than they 
could be by any formal effort at establishing a 
Papal envoy at Washington. 

The sorrows and the joys of princes, who by 
tradition are the embodiment of anti-Papal policies, 
have never yet escaped the sympathetic notice of 
the gentle Father by the Tiber, who truly feels that 
he is, in ways not recognized by men, but known 
of God, the shepherd of the sheep, although they 
"are not of this fold." 

There went to Rome some few years since a 
gentleman who possibly would be accepted by all 
Americans as the very typical and satisfactory 
example of what is best and most characteristic in 
our breezy, strenuous, successful, happy and gen- 
erous Western civilization. 

This gentleman has accumulated a large fortune 
and attained to very great distinction as a political 
leader. Well groomed, democratic, approachable, 
versatile and sane, he is looked upon as the prince 
of "good fellows," the cleverest raconteur in Amer- 
ica, and the altogether delightful aristocratic com- 
moner, as he is to be found only in this country. 
Wealth has given him perfect ease and savoir faire, 
but it has not in any sense seemed to have sepa- 



72 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

rated him from the masses of common men. A 
man long used to managing great interests and rul- 
ing armies of men, and one wholly devoid of senti- 
mental or vapid motives. Just a huge, practical, 
successful, thoroughly modern fellow, the ripest 
fruit of the complex and mighty forces that are now 
shaping the differentiated type of American man- 
hood. 

Well, he — who likes to be known by us all as 
"our Chauncey" — went to Rome, and found no diffi- 
culty in getting a private audience of the Holy 
Father. Fancy those two men face to face. There 
may be on this earth two men more utterly unlike, 
but surely they were not to be easily discovered. 
Think of it. The venerable Pontiff, upon the very 
verge of death, and fairly radiating supernaturally- 
acquired light — a man whose feet alone rest on this 
earth, his mind and heart rising above the clouds 
of time ; and, then the other. A man of the earth 
earthy, tingling with practical, palpable interest in 
things of here and now. A cheery, whole-souled, 
matter-of-fact, hard-headed man of affairs and of 
no sentiment. 

Think, then, of these two men confronting one 
another. No emotional young woman, nor faithful 
soul trembling before the awful representative of 
Heaven, nor poet conscious of the incarnate human. 



Leo XIII. 73 

age-long, world's hope standing before him there 
in the bent and h-agile man of ninety. No. But, 
on the contrary, a hlase, cosmopolitan, self-made 
and self-satisfied man of the world. Behold them 
there. The man of the world before the man of 
God. We all know the result of that short inter- 
view; for our good, genial friend has made it the 
fascinating st^bject of more than one public dis- 
course. The American Protestant left Leo XIII. 
completely overwhelmed with the moral majesty, 
the spiritual grandeur and the intellectual loftiness 
of the "Pope of Rome," who, in the view of the 
"history," the preaching and the general opinion 
in which he was educated, was "the great anti- 
Christ," and the embodiment of ignorance, super- 
stition and retrogression. "Never," says Senator 
Depew, "never did the reality of the supernatural 
or the nearness of the spiritual seem so clear to me 
as when I knelt in the presence of that hoHest of 
human beings and heard that gentle old man ask 
God to bless me." The brilliant and eloquent 
senator may never become a Catholic, but who can 
doubt that the whole aspect of his mind is changed 
concerning CathoHcity? Who in his presence is 
likely now to utter, unrebuked, the ancient calum- 
nies against the church of Leo? Who shall attempt 
to measure the ultimate results of just that little 



74 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

conquest by the Pope of one extremely typical man 
of this anything but faithful age of ours? 

The present pontificate will me remembered by 
the encouraging and very general awakening of 
Cathohcs to their responsibility toward their breth- 
ren without the pale. The ever-increasing tide of 
conversions to the true faith has not been the mere 
outcome of accident, nor is there in the spirit of the 
times aught that could lead one to expect this 
Romeward tendency. More than to any other 
cause, for the refreshing fact we are compelled to 
turn to the benevolent and tactful attitude of the 
reigning Holy Father. And with the fine sense of 
a diplomatist, Leo has bent his earnest thought and 
loving effort especially in the direction of the great 
English-speaking peoples of the earth. 

To the conversion of England and the United 
States the Pope has given thought, prayers, encyc- 
licals and men. With his finger on the pulse of Hfe, 
he has taken immediate cognizance of every indica- 
tion of changing moods and tendencies. This much 
he has magnificently achieved, at any rate: the 
Catholic religion is now no longer negligible. Who 
reads at all must now read of Rome's claims ; who- 
ever thinks is now compelled to note the constant 
pressure of her insistent message; and he who sees 
or hears at all must now be made aware that in all 



Leo XIII. 75 

fields of action, thought, achievement or endeavor, 
the Church (thought only yesterday to have quite 
passed from "Anglo-Saxon" life) is very much alive 
and omnipresent. 

And all this, one need scarcely say, has been 
accomplished without the even seeming compro- 
mise of any principle or minimizing of any truth. 

One most dramatic episode of his pontificate 
will illustrate the ''stubbornness" of Leo's grasp 
upon the reins of discipline and doctrine. 

Ever since the tremendous change brought 
about in English religious life and practice by the 
Oxford Movement, there has been a growing body 
of most respectable divines in the established 
Church of England who have been urging the 
general discussion of the whole question of "Angli- 
can Orders" and the possible arrival at some cordial 
understanding with the Holy See upon that funda- 
mentally important matter. 

Nor were these gentlemen without their sympa- 
thizers within the Church. Ecclesiastics of weight 
in France and elsewhere felt that if, upon a thor- 
ough investigation of the historical and theological 
aspects of the question, it should transpire that there 
were valid grounds, however slight, on which the 
orders of Anglican "priests" could be posited, a 
most momentous step might at once be taken in 



76 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

the direction of that unity for which the Christian 
world yearns now as possibly never before. 

Thousands of pious clergymen in England and 
America, believing themselves to be true priests, 
and conscious of the paralyzing effect of separation 
from the center of authority, stood ready, it was 
declared, to make large sacrifices and broad con- 
cessions, if Rome would but pronounce their orders 
valid and meet them (in minor matters of pure 
discipline) in the same spirit of maternal charity 
that she had manifested many times on the return 
to her communion of various oriental churches 
estranged from her by centuries of heresy or schism. 

When one remembers all that might logically 
be the immediate and final outcome of such a 
return to visible inter-communion on the part of 
the learned, devoted and influential clergy of the 
great Anglican churches of the world, the true sig- 
nificance of the dramatic situation is felt. 

Some of the noblest men in England, both 
clerical and lay, threw themselves heartily into the 
movement. The late great champion of all good 
things, Gladstone, himself communicated privately 
with Leo, urging upon His HoHness the very 
serious consequences that must inevitably flow from 
an adverse decision by the Holy See. "Postpone," 
said Gladstone, "postpone the matter, make no 



Leo XIII. ^^ 

decision now, unless — which may God grant — a 
favorable one may be determined on." 

Finally the agitation reached a point where it 
was felt that something must be done. And then 
that strangest theological and ecclesiastical situa- 
tion since the Reformation was witnessed. A great 
commission of Anglicans actually proceeded to the 
eternal city and placed at the feet of the Sovereign 
Pontiff their manly and pathetic request — that for 
the sake of the priceless gem of Christian unity he 
make a thorough investigation of their claims to 
being truly ordained priests of the Church of God. 

God alone knows, moreover, how many prayers 
ascended from old gray churches in the exquisite 
shires of England — churches that centuries before 
had known the warmth and life of true communi- 
cation with the heart at Rome. 

Visions of the old glory must have been seen 
by many a zealous vicar murmuring the matins and 
even-song in chancels that were built by priests 
whom long lines of the predecessors of this Leo 
had said were priests and of whose orders there had 
not been a doubt. 

And many souls within the Church there were 
who also hoped (though scarcely with much heart) 
that in some way there might be found a loophole, 
however small, through which the clergy of the 



78 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Establishment could be induced to submit to the 
universal authority of the Chair of Peter. 

At last the necessary machinery was set in 
motion among the proper congregations forming 
the Papal court, and, after the usual delays, made 
requisite by the importance of preparing a pronun- 
ciamento of final weight upon a question so far- 
reaching, Rome spoke. And the case was forever 
closed. Before reminding you, my friends, of what 
Rome said, give me a moment in which to ask 
you to consider some of the aspects of the situation 
as they must certainly have appeared to any eye 
not utterly intent upon beholding nothing but truth 
in its eternal and abstract light. 

First of all, think of the immense immediate 
benefit to be expected consequent upon the admis- 
sion of milHons of enlightened and worthy men to 
communion in the Catholic Church. It would be 
difiicult to calculate the importance of the English- 
speaking churches in the present condition of the 
development of the world. 

As a stroke of far-reaching poHcy what could 
compare with the reunion of Rome and Canter- 
aspects of the question, it should transpire that there 
tige of the British Empire, humanly speaking, no 
sacrifice could be considered too costly, no conces- 
sions too radical. 



Leo XIII. 79 

Of course, the Catholic understands that where 
a principle is clearly involved the Church is not free 
even to discuss its abandonment or modification; 
but here was a question upon which certain Catholic 
theologians were, at the least, willing to admit that 
there was room for investigation and which required 
not a discussion of any Catholic dogma, but simply 
the determination of a series of purely historical 
facts in the light of alleged new sources of knowl- 
edge. And, even after Rome had assured herself 
that probabiHty lay squarely against the AngHcan 
position, there still remained the plausible conten- 
tion of the astute and pious Gladstone — that a post- 
ponement of formal decision was in every way 
preferable to an immediate (if adverse) settlement 
of the dispute. 

But what, as a matter of fact, does Leo do? 
True to that sublime ''fatality" which has made 
nearly all the vital steps of Rome seem rashly ill- 
timed, he presses the prompt and exhaustive exam- 
ination of the whole question, and then shatters the 
hopes of every ritualist in the Episcopalian com- 
munion, crushes with a word the rosy promise of 
an early healing of the deepest wound in the 
Christian family, and silences forever the very dis- 
cussion of a possible beneficent undoing of the 
frightful work of the sixteenth century. While the 



8o Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

learning-, the piety and the zeal of the Anglican 
world listens respectfully for the yearned-for word 
that shall discover the breach of hope in the old 
walls of misunderstanding, making a rapprochement 
more than a dream of charity, Leo delivers his 
judgment, from which there is no possible appeal. 
"Anglican Orders are absolutely null and void." 
The ironical rejoinders of the English bishops show 
that from every human point of view no greater 
diplomatic folly could have been reached. But from 
that only point of view which an unflinching and 
unerring guardian of eternal truth must take, Leo's 
disheartening decision is known to be already 
bringing forth the glorious fruit which truth alone 
can bear, and, like all previous acts of the Sovereign 
Pontiffs (thought by contemporaneous wisdom to 
have been unwise), this also shall be found in the 
lapse of time to have been the timeliest, wisest and 
the most ''diplomatic" course, being the only course 
consistent with the truth. 

As Leo's predecessors in Tudor times lost all 
of England rather than countenance the unlawful 
dissolution of one true marriage, so Leo now in 
our own times declines to barter another of the 
sacraments for the return of England. Perhaps 
the providence that shapes the destiny of the old 
Church will come to be most clearly recognized 



Leo XIII. 8i 

.during our day by reason of the fact that, at a time 
of universal doctrinal laxity, events transpired which 
called for positive dogmatic declarations from the 
Holy See of such emphatic nature that she was 
thrown into that glaring contrast with all others 
that shows the Church to be in very deed the one 
and only keeper of the faith. It is amid quick- 
sands that rocks seem most the desperately neces- 
sary thing. 

Thus we have seen that our Holy Father has 
won the love and confidence of the whole world, 
while at the same time thundering into its ears the 
solemn and sublime reiteration of changeless 
truths. 

What other sovereign, what other statesman, 
what prime minister, has been found able to guide 
a government or policy through the transitions 
and the dissolutions of the last half century without 
concessions so important as to almost obliterate 
the fundamental principles of its inception? Diplo- 
macy attempts no more than merely the best 
obtainable; but Leo, defying compromise, de- 
mands the right — and gets it. 

Such is this marvelous Fisherman. The Serv- 
ant of the servants of God reigns now in his ninety- 
third year with a Father's heart and a philosopher's 
prudence and a general's grasp, the oldest Insti- 



82 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

tution on the globe, guarding eternal principles 
from the corroding contact of the things of time, 
and yet compelHng Time to feel the impact of 
Eternity. 

sji ^ ^ ^ ^ 

In that prophecy of the monk Malachy, Leo's 
successor is to be mystically known as "Ignis 
Ardens," which, by interpretation, means ''A Burn- 
ing Fire." Ominous, one must believe, is such 
a name as that. Are events shaping indeed toward 
one more time of fierce temptation and of trial for 
the Church's children? Who knows? There are 
not wanting signs of some such possible outcome 
of present tendencies. And the successor of our 
beloved Pope may have to turn from the great 
paths of Leo's work in education and the discus- 
sion of economic questions, to the heroic and 
desperate defense of the holy Church's very citadel. 
Who, indeed, knows? 

One thing is certain. Be the great issues of 
the coming days what God shall suffer them to be, 
the field has been surveyed, the dangers all located, 
the armies of the defenders superbly drilled, the 
campaign brilliantly mapped out, by our own 
"Light from Heaven," our prudent, trenchant and 
far-seeing Leo. When that pathetic day arrives 
on which we shall be told that the august and ven- 



Leo XIII. 83 

erable man has fallen on sleep, and that the great- 
est personage in Europe has passed away, our 
sorrow will be mellowed by the glorious thought 
that the eternal Light which shone in him so 
brightly has not gone out; but that it will illu- 
minate the minds of those who are to name Leo's 
successor — yes, and will, if the stress of the un- 
known future shall make it necessary, kindle within 
the heart of that successor the flame of that 
supremest courage and fiercest faith that shall make 
him indeed an "Ignis Ardens." 

Leo must go, at no far distant date, the sorrow- 
ful and lonely way of all the sons of men. But 
not until the consummation of the world shall 
Peter's Chair be vacant. And as we still look back 
to the magnificent achievements of many Popes, 
so, too, our children and our children's children 
will hear of the long life of the great Leo, the whole 
of which was given to the defending of the Church 
of the living God and to the winning back to her 
dear mother's arms the millions whom the great 
enemy of souls had kept from her. And, my good 
friends, we should not miss the inspiration of the 
thought that we have had this man for our own 
leader, and we should pay to him the tribute he 
would most certainly consider such by personal and 
very real development of all our spiritual faculties, 



84 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

in order that when "Ignis Ardens" calls for cru- 
saders in the coming wars against the Dark, we 
may respond : "Here. All. We are the men 
whom Leo trained and taught." In quite the lofti- 
est and truest sense you and I can place upon the 
glorious pontificate now drawing to its end the 
chaplet of success, namely, by being in ourselves 
the kind of Catholics that Leo has outHned, both 
in his teachings, and, better yet, in the superb pro- 
portions of his own strong self. If there be any 
more inspiring thought than this, I do not know 
of it. And, thanking you for listening so long and 
patiently, I leave you with it. 




B, ^ir Cijomas iHore. 



B. SIR THOMAS MORE. 



TO many minds outside of the Church her atti- 
tude and acts seem frequently behind the 
times. They see her taking a century or two to 
decide to do something, more centuries to do it; 
and the rest of time to think about having done 
it. Themselves belonging to little institutions, 
which, born yesterday, have given, even today, 
alarming indications of being about to suffer dis- 
solution, they feel that whatever they would do 
they must do quickly, and it naturally nettles them 
to see the calm deliberation of the staid old mother. 
It must be irritating to behold the serene move- 
ments of that one institution on the earth that can 
draw drafts against Eternity and get them cashed. 
Of course we, who are children of the dear old 
Church, view the whole matter dififerently. We 
realize that from the earliest ages there have been 
scores of times when the steps taken by the Church 
appeared slow to the contemporaneous eye, bhnded 
by passion or clouded by self-interest, but which, 



88 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

as now surveyed from the best ''coign of vantage" 
— the lapse of time — are known to have been pre- 
cisely what the far-reaching eye of wisdom would 
have approved. 

Nay, more than this : time after time the Church 
shows herself to be well in advance of the proces- 
sion of mankind around her ; and, when the lumber- 
ing pack-trains do at last arrive, they find that her 
forethought has du'g the wells, lighted the camp- 
fires and made all ready for the well-being of the 
whole weary caravan of purblind pilgrims. 

When the Church is seen to be behind a move- 
ment, the eye of the philosopher can see that her 
position resembles that of the charioteer, who, 
while behind the horses, still guides them. 

My present object in reminding you of this is 
to bring to your notice what I conceive to be one 
of the most timely acts of Rome during our recent 
times. A few years since, running her eye back 
over the past in order to enrich her calendar of 
saints, the Church selected the names of several 
of her devoted children, and began the august 
process of their canonization. Among these we 
find the name of one of the most fascinating char- 
acters in history ; a man who, as we shall see, offers 
to us (the lay folk of these practical and strenuous 
times) a model at once inspiring and amazingly 



B. Sir Thomas More 89 

up-to-date. The average man must feel a sense of 
reassurance frequently on finding that they place 
the pictures of the saints high up the walls of 
churches, as by that very elevation one would seem 
to know that there is, indeed, a great gulf fixed 
between them and our poor, humdrum selves. 
Popes, doctors of the church, ecclesiastics, nuns, 
mystics and martyrs and apostles — we gaze at 
them and wonder at the supernatural power of 
grace in so transfiguring our common clay. The- 
ology, moreover, distinctly teaches us that we, too, 
if we but correspond with grace as did those holy 
ones, may come to sanctity like theirs. But there 
can be no doubt that, by the very fact that life 
and duty lay, for so many of the saints, along high 
lines so totally distinct from those to which the call 
of duty has bound poor, strugghng, work-a-day, 
plain laymen like ourselves, much of the practical 
and timely value of their example is lost on us. 

A cobbler may admire the skill and the dex- 
terity of a great violinist, but watching his deft 
fingers fretting the most extreme harmonics can 
scarcely help the humble fellow much in the imme- 
diate matter of pulling the wax-ends right. One 
finger differeth from another finger in function. 

No doubt the general principles remain the 
same, and he who, as a monk or pope, became a 



90 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

saint, did so by simply doing what he did in har- 
mony with the divine — a harmony that lends itself 
to wax-ends as to the throbbing mysteries in violin 
strings. But general principles have no such 
straight road to man's appreciation as through 
concrete example. 

We may be glad, I say, that they have pictured 
many of the saints so high up on the walls of 
churches; but when they come to put him into 
stained-glass windows, who is the subject of our 
thoughts to-night, they will do best if they do so 
down on the level of the pews. 

No man of us but may go straight up to Blessed 
Sir Thomas More as man to man; and if I find 
discrepancy between his outhnes and my own, I 
cannot in his case fall cowardly back upon the plea 
that he was, in the very nature of his surroundings 
and his Hfe, different from me. No. He was at 
every salient point such as we are — we laymen in 
the world — and it was not of any of his great qual- 
ities of intellect or the external matters of liis 
political career that holy mother Church made 
mention when she declared him blessed. She 
pointed out one thing — and it was just that virtue 
to which the humblest and the least gifted may 
constantly aspire — namely, his courage — blunt, 
manly, moral, glorious courage to profess and to 



B. Sir Thomas More 91 

defend the faith amidst the general apostasy and 
under the tremendous pressure of popular and 
plausible agitation, to bend to which would have 
meant power unlimited and opposition to which 
meant ignominy, ruin and death. 

Surely no action of the Church during our times 
surpasses in usefulness this most inspiring selection 
of the bluff and forth-right old Sir Thomas More 
to be the subject of our emulative thought and 
study. 

Look for a moment at the surprising ways in 
which his very personaHty is of the utmost interest 
to us. Note, if you please, how singularly the great 
old Chancellor may be called brother — my brother 
and your own. 

In the first place, he was a married man, God 
bless him. I am with him. He had a growing 
family — again we follow him. He was at first a 
struggling young lawyer, and his ambitions, dis- 
appointments, worries, were such as ours. After 
the children had gone scampering ofif to bed, he 
leaned upon his chimney shelf and planned and 
feared and hoped, even as we do now and men will 
do so long as fatherhood brings care and sweet 
anxieties to earnest hearts. The competition and 
the stress of Hfe weighed upon him as on ourselves. 
He felt the sting of jealousy and the bite of hate 



92 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

from meaner men, just as all must who shall 
attempt to make of honor a working-mate and of 
truth a spouse. Considering the glaring opportu- 
nities of his career, he lived and died a poor and 
unpretentious man. 

He moved a hale, honest, cheery, squarely-built 
man among his neighbors, and even after his 
advancement to power and state remained the 
simple chap who loved a few tried friends, a good 
old book and quiet by his homely hearth. A 
scholar without pedantry, a Christian without 
boast, a politician without money and a gentleman 
without prejudice. 

Such was the charming personality of this new 
one of the Beatified. The marks, at least, are those 
which every gentleman today would wish his 
friends to observe in him, and, more important, 
they are of such a nature as to encourage every 
gentleman to hope that he may find them in himself 
— himself, where no pretense avails or seeming is 
thought worth while. 

But the usefulness of Blessed Thomas More to 
you and me is not confined to the consideration of 
his so winsome personal characteristics, potent as 
we believe these to have been. 

The times in which he lived that strong, good 
life of his were such as to enhance the value of the 
man to us as an example immensely. 



B. Sir Thomas More 93 

While it is true that history does not repeat itself, 
save in the mere rhetorical appeals of special plead- 
ers, there do come times when the convulsions and 
drifts of life result in throwing the world into per- 
spectives whose general lines resemble those of 
some anterior time. 

Periods of rest succeed to periods of transition. 
Time is required for the digesting of the new- 
found truths, a generation or two having to pass 
before mankind can grow accustomed to the new 
conditions. 

Then, after this quiet chewing of the cud has 
been accomplished, the stirrings of desire for still 
more life begin to manifest themselves, and pres- 
ently the world is once again in all the throes and 
birth-pangs of feverish change. It naturally follows 
that they who live in periods of one kind or the 
other are called upon to pass through similar 
experiences to those of their forerunners whose 
lives were cast in a like time. 

And during the Christian era no two such 
similar convergings of the lines of life have been 
experienced as those presented by the state of 
things during the times of good Sir Thomas More 
and our own times. 

One may immediately locate him when one 
recalls the fact that More was a schoolboy of 



94 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

twelve or thereabouts when Christopher Columbus 
returned from that momentous voyage which 
turned the world itself half over. 

This means that More's mature years were 
those which saw the Renaissance at its bright 
zenith. And that means that he lived amid the 
most tremendous currents of unrest and change the 
world has known except alone in our own days. 
And it was not in the mere fact that both were 
times of restlessness and change that his and our 
own days can be considered similar. The causes 
of the movements were alike, the arguments ad- 
vanced for the proposed departures, the grouping 
of the various schools, the manifest results of the 
aggressive efforts, the scandal, dread, uncertainty 
and action and reaction — all of the features of the 
spiritual and intellectual and social revolution grew 
from the same conditions and reflected the same 
controlling motives. 

As one recites the causes of the transitions of 
More's age and traces their effects, it might almost 
be thought that the description was of the last half 
of the nineteenth century. Recall some of the 
features now. 

When the crusaders came back from the East 
they brought under their palmers' robes queer pig- 
skin and papyrus parchments, and when the West- 



B. Sir Thomas More Z 95 

ern mind had rubbed its intellectual spectacles in 
order to decipher the uncouth scrolls, men cried: 
"Why, it is Greek!" It was, indeed, Greek. And 
in a century or two Europe had waked to the 
magnificent and blinding beauty, the subtle and 
profound philosophy — in short, to all the glory that 
was Greece. And art and poetry and music burst 
forth from underneath the iron weight of the stern 
feudal system. Schools multiplied. The eager 
brain of man began to question the material 
universe around him. New sciences sprang into 
audacious life. The telescope was pushing the 
spangled mystery farther and farther off and bring- 
ing more and more of the conjectured within the 
domination of the known. 

The earth, complacently supposed to be a cen- 
tral, fixed, immense plateau (the throne of his 
imperial majesty, man), had just been set ofif spin- 
ning into space, a quite infinitesimal and insignifi- 
cant small ball, of which there were some untold 
myriads immeasurably larger and more important 
humming around the trackless wastes of space. 

Geology was most impertinently also cracking 
the crust of that same little ball and catching God 
at his creative secrets. 

Medicine, breaking away from its long, disrep- 
utable partnership with necromancy and the black 



96 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

arts, was probing the very mystery of life itself and 
sneeringly demanding of theology proof of the 
soul's existence, no trace of which could be discov- 
ered in the inmost recesses of the brain or heart, 
as these revealed their secrets to the remorseless 
knife. 

Printing was just invented and making it pos- 
sible for any man's idea to reach all other men in 
briefest time. 

And here comes this Columbus to tell us that 
there is a whole world beneath our feet, teeming 
with wealth and opening to the imagination a 
dream of greatness that must soon throw all of the 
yesterdays into the pitifulest paleness. A larger 
life, the new learning, to-morrow — these were the 
splendid battle-cries that rang through Europe 
when young More went up to Oxford to get his 
education. How like our own time this ! Small 
wonder that the universities were drunk with the 
new wine of intellectual pride. Rich soil, indeed, 
for the rank weeds of hasty generalization and that 
illogical revolt against authority, on the absurd 
ground that those who possessed it did not at the 
same time possess specific knowledge (wholly out- 
side their province) which nobody in fact possessed 
until the day before. 

We have seen lads go to college in our time. 
They come back sophomores for the first vacation. 



B. Sir Thomas More 97 

At once we note the lofty air that always marks 
the man who knows too much to still believe in 
God. On questioning the calf, we learn that he 
has learned the names of half a score of bugs or 
microbes and bacteria. He prates about the tram- 
mels of orthodox belief; chats jauntily about 
abiogenesis and protoplasm, and gives one to 
understand that, being abreast of the advanced 
thought of the day, he, of course, no longer accepts 
the supernatural claims of Christianity, and — he 
might add — no longer feels the necessity of taking 
the ten commandments seriously. Few young men 
can pass through the ordeal unhurt. Behold More 
as he passes through it. The case is parallel. 

When the boy More reached Oxford he found 
that great seat of learning divided and astir, as 
were all schools, by reason of the irresistible and 
brilliant campaign which had been waging upon 
the part of the ''New Learning." 

Greek, mathematics and the new sciences were 
rallying to their study all the most forceful, younger 
and gifted men of the age. 

But because of the apostasy of many and the 
moral and political errors which many of the "new" 
teachers insisted in mixing with their purely scien- 
tific postulates, there grew up a nervous dread upon 
the part of older and more conservative men. 



98 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

These tendencies and reactions produced a spirit 
of almost malicious anti-ecclesiastical feeling among 
the men of the New Learning ; and also a contrary- 
spirit of timid and suspicious dislike among the 
elder and more devout. 

Young More thus found himself between two 
diametrically opposing forces when he began his 
scholar's life at Oxford. Upon the one hand were 
the progressive, brilliant men to whom he would 
be naturally drawn by his own very extraordinary 
intellectual powers; and, on the other hand, there 
were the older, holier, safer men, to whom the lad, 
with his pure heart and singularly saintly character, 
would certainly turn for light and guidance. 

It is intensely interesting to watch the little 
fellow as he goes through that difficult and neces- 
sary path in which so many thousands of our sons 
have made ship-wreck of faith encountering pre- 
cisely the same dangers, and yet through which he 
passed magnificently, proving that he — admittedly 
the greatest intellect in Oxford at the time — not 
only found it possibleto reconcile the most advanced 
thought with humble faith, but vahantly to throw 
the gauntlet down before the enemy, declaring that 
it is folly to maintain there is the slightest incon- 
jsistency between the two; for here is he. Sir 
Thomas More, scholar and saint — let him who 



B. Sir Thomas More 99 

dares deny it. It was not long before the learned 
men of Oxford began to realize that More had 
brains of most exceptional briUiancy. His fame as 
a Greek scholar had reached even the great Eras- 
mus. And in the newly aroused interest in mathe- 
matics and the physical sciences he soon became 
an enthusiast, and in time a recognized leader. His 
keen imagination, fortified by thought and wide 
research, was already giving promise of the deep 
impress that it was destined to leave on the liter- 
ature of England. 

We may imagine, therefore, with what pride 
he must have been regarded by the progressive 
scholars at the university, and how they must have 
urged so hopeful a beginner to declare himself of 
the "New," leaving to the pious (and brainless) the 
care of those worn-out beliefs that even now were 
giving signs of speedy dissolution. 

And, on the contrary, when it was learned by 
his confessors that God had sent a very saint to 
Oxford — ^when they discovered that the lad wore 
next his body the torment known as the "hair shirt" 
— ^when they beheld the frequency and fervor of 
his reception of the sacraments, how the devout 
old souls must have prayed that he might not be 
lost by playing with those scientific dangers that 
had destroyed so many of their choicest. 

' LofC. 



loo Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Doubtless he was reminded on more than one 
occasion that neither in Greek odes nor problems 
in mathematics nor chemical analyses was there 
salvation. Note, now, the bearing of this new 
saint of ours. 

Declining to rush ahead over the brink of arro- 
gant assumption with the progressive hot-heads 
and to hold back from free investigation with timid 
and illogical conservatives. More took his stand 
where there is desperate need that men of faith and 
brains stand also in our day. 

"What was true is true," we might have heard 
him say, "and therefore I hold to my last hour all 
that is held by the one holy Catholic and apostolic 
Roman Church, but my sword hand I keep free, 
also, so that I may be found in the forefront of them 
that fight for knowledge. And thus, when any 
gem of truth be found in any remote corner of the 
universe of God, I shall be there as soon as any 
else, to the intent that I may claim the new truth 
in the sweet name of Christ." The astronomical 
observatory upon the Vatican should certainly be 
dedicated to Blessed Sir Thomas More, and every 
Catholic investigator in advanced laboratories make 
him his patron saint. Abreast of the bravest and 
anchored to the eternal principles of Catholic truth, 
what a sublime, what an inspiring model ! 



B. Sir Thomas More loi 

As soon as he left Oxford More married and 
launched out upon the practice of the law. Being 
the son of a respected judge, the young barrister 
advanced, perhaps, somewhat more rapidly than he 
might otherwise have done. At all events, these 
first few years of life in the world found him a 
cheerful, unselfish, sturdy, wholesome sort of man 
that men liked well to call their friend and feared 
to have for enemy. 

At home devoted to the education of his chil- 
dren, his books, his quaint, old, puttering, literary 
and antiquarian work. Abroad, a coming man of 
large ambition, singular contempt for place and 
riches, and withal one whom wise ones said it 
would be worth while to watch and placate. 

Uneventful enough are those first years of the 
great Chancellor's life, afterwards to be so crowded 
with breathless dramatic interest. 

As if the key were being set for the sonata of 
his whole tragic life, strangely enough, his first 
appearance upon the stage of public life in any 
noticeable role was his startling opposition in the 
House of Commons, which brought Sir Thomas 
into the public eye, and, what was more significant, 
under the very violent displeasure of the king. 

Such an untoward event, moreover, meant more 
in those days than it would today. At that time 



\ r 



I02 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

if the king said, "Thumbs up," it was, indeed, 
thumbs up. Monarchy then was limited by very 
little other than its own sweet will. And on the 
royal pleasure hung- for the ambitious their only 
hope. Now it seemed that the king-'s sister fancied 
herself in need of some poor thousands more of 
income for "pin money," and so it graciously 
pleased her royal brother to notify the loyal Com- 
mons that His Majesty had deigned to allow them 
to tax themselves for the additional amount re- 
quired for the increased "pin money" of Her Royal 
Highness. "Thumbs up," and every thumb went 
dutifully up save only More's, which went, against 
all precedent, stubbornly down. The splendid 
speech he made in opposition to the royal mandate 
is the first democratic utterance of that age. 

More realized his peril, and prophesied an 
ignominious defeat of his amendment at the hands 
of the subservient Commons. Fancy his glee, 
therefore, on finding that his protest had prevailed, 
and that the princess was flatly told that she must 
worry along as best she could without the increased 
income. His parliamentary victory he knew must 
mean his private ruin; but he is now a man with 
influence over other men, marked for destruction, 
possibly, but branded because they feared him. 
This was for Thomas More all that was desired. 



B. Sir Thomas More 103 

He was felt. He was a force no longer negligible. 
Henceforth he must be reckoned with in the affairs 
of state, in the development of England. He was 
philosopher enough to see that troublous times 
were coming upon his country and the world ; and, 
as in his quality of scholar he had rejoiced to mingle 
thoroughly equipped in the very thick of the great 
struggle of the "New" against the ''Old," so now 
he joyously was girding up his loins for the tre- 
mendous issues soon to be fought in the much 
larger school of life. 

The king was furious. Not only More himself 
felt the full force of the royal rage, but even his 
father was stripped of his judicial ermine and dark 
days had indeed fallen upon the family. 

But tyrants are not always fools, and Henry's 
dearest foe never charged him with any lack of 
brains. Events soon showed that he was wise 
enough to see that stuff like that of which Tom 
More was made had priceless value, could one but 
get it safe into one's service. 

Charming enough to be authentic is that tradi- 
tion which tells that, on a day, as More, with book 
in hand, was taking the air back of his house, his 
favorite daughter Margaret came running to him, 
shouting with childish glee that a brave cavalcade 
was there, all in the bright king's livery. 



I04 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

And, sure enough, it was a summons from the 
king himself. More was to go at once to Whitehall 
to the king. His good-byes to his beloved ones 
must have been embittered by the fear that it must 
be forever. This summons, surely, could have no 
explanation save that the blow so long impending 
was at last to fall. Night had already fallen when 
the stout-hearted Commoner was ushered into the 
royal presence. The king stood looking forth into 
the darkness, and seeing More drop on his knees, 
ran to him cheerily and bade him rise. ''Nay, nay, 
man," shouted the king, ''we sent for thee for quite 
another purpose than that thou fearest. Look, 
man, the night is dark ; no sight of moon or stars. 
And yet were any of our lords who fatten on our 
smiles here with us, and we should say, 'My lord, 
behold how fair the moon shines,' each wagging, 
lying head would answer us, 'Your Majesty, we 
never saw the moon so fair.' But, More, if we say 
now to thee, see how the moon shines, by heaven, 
man, thou wouldst turn 'round upon that honest 
heel of thine and say, 'Your Majesty, you lie.' We 
want thee near us so truth may reach us when there 
is need of it." 

That were a portfolio worth having in any cab- 
inet. What one of us but would enjoy the execu- 
tion of that commission from time to time? But 



B. Sir Thomas More 105 

to a man like More it must have seemed sufficient 
reason for having been born at all. He eagerly 
accepted the delightful task, and thence sprung up 
that singular and most dramatic intimacy of that 
man of truth with the two Tudor monarchs, who 
were in all respects farthest from him in nature. 

At last the power and brilliancy of his grand 
mind were fittingly staged, and the true drama of 
Sir Thomas More begins. 

From one degree of royal favor to a higher the 
man advances, but lacking one certain mark of such 
careers — he remains poor. His strength lies in his 
very independence; they need him, fear his integ- 
rity, lean on his marvelous conscience. Then, while 
still at the mere threshold of early manhood, he is 
created the Lord High Chancellor of England, 
being the youngest man — the only layman — who 
had ever occupied that most exalted station. 

For a moment consider just what that meant. 
The various courts of early England, like our own, 
were much embarrassed by the fine technicalities 
of due procedure. Red-tape and precedent, order 
and formality delayed or quite frustrated the ends 
of justice, and the poor litigant, wearied and 
mulcted in sums frequently larger than the amount 
at stake, despaired of getting his rights at all. Thus 
it was felt that there should be a court free from 



io6 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

the rules that guided (not to say, neutralized) the 
ordinary tribunals. To this court, to be presided 
over by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself in 
character of Lord High Chancellor, might come 
at will whoever had a grievance, and, without law- 
yers, Avrits, summonses, postponements or Dog- 
berry tomfoolery, state in plain English what he 
desired or claimed. Each morning in old West- 
minster Hall sat the Archbishop to render judg- 
ment on the sole ground of God's commandments, 
good conscience and downright common-sense. 
This court came, therefore, to be known as the 
Court of Conscience, the Court of the common 
people, the Court of God. 

No layman until Thomas More had been Lord 
Chancellor. In itself this is a signal mark of his 
acknowledged probity. 

Our Saint is now, therefore, at the summit of 
his career and every way the mightiest man in 
England. Let us review the state in which the 
world abroad was at the time. The forces of dis- 
integration and of transition have been at work. 
The very foundations of society, the church, the 
school and the state are beginning to feel the effects 
of the persistent and ruthless assault upon author- 
ity. Reverence has given place to a spirit of con- 
temptuous disregard for principles and law, while 



B. Sir Thomas More 107 

the intoxication consequent upon the sudden evo- 
lution of the scientific idea has imperiled the 
equipoise and synthetic restraints of true reason. 

Revolt along the whole line awaits only the 
voice of those daring enough to make the academic 
theories of the schools the touch-stone of a polit- 
ical, religious and social programme of action. 

Men's minds were ready. All that was needed 
was the strong arm of those prepared to put the 
revolutionary principles to the test practically. 

Nor was the waiting long. Soon every province 
on the continent was rocking under the awful blows 
of almost universal rebellion. And Rome saw 
section after section of the map of Europe pass 
from her ancient sway into the devastating whirl- 
wind of frenzied theory. 

But Britain swerved not. Secured by isolation 
or for some still unseen divinely ordered purpose, 
the Catholics throughout Great Britain held stoutly 
by the Holy See. When Luther had nailed his 
thesis of protest on the cathedral door, Henry VHI. 
it was who answered and refuted the German's 
heresy. And the good Pope, elated at this mark 
of royal fealty to truth, sent him the apostolic 
benediction and styled him the Defender of the 
Faith. Again tradition furnishes a gorgeous sub- 
ject for the historic painter. Let us imagine the 



io8 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

coming of the magnificent cortege to Winchester, 
bearing the Papal blessing to the faithful king. 

Along the boot of Italy, and down the sweet 
French valleys, had the long train of great ecclesi- 
astics come, mounted on milk-white mules. 

Shipping at St. Malo, a few days would have 
brought them to Portsmouth, and then a journey 
of a day or two to Winchester, where was the king. 

Picture him throned and crowned and waiting, 
with his court, the coming of the bearers of so rich 
a gift. And, leaning on his chair, the young Lord 
Chancellor, in his accustomed leather coat, his 
brown hair tossed above his strong, fair face never 
so happy. 

The solemn reading of the great parchment 
done, fancy the joy of the crusader's heart that was 
Sir Thomas More's. Hear him exclaim: ''Your 
Majesty, this is the brightest day of all your reign. 
God, but it makes one think the wheels of time 
turned back and Merry England at her best once 
more. For, as when news did come that the good 
Hermit Peter on Clermont plain had told the 
shame of our Lord's Sepulcher in Paynims' hands, 
it was our Richard, he of the Lion's heart, that 
struck the mightiest blow to right .that sacrilege, 
even so now, when news hath come that not the 
sepulcher in which the dead Christ lay, but the 



B. Sir Thomas More 109 

more glorious tabernacles of the hearts of men, 
where the living- Christ doth lovingly vouchsafe to 
dwell, be by the sacrilegious hands of heretics 
assailed, behold, again it is the King of England 
that doth draw, not now the sword, but that which 
is much mightier, the pen, to right the wrong." 
Could Henry have died then ! He lived. And in 
a little while the new ''Defender of the Faith" was 
breeding, by his lust, the foulest chapter in all that 
long, black story that tells of a world's passing 
from the light of faith into the endless quest for 
rest where there can be none, and light where there 
is neither sun nor moon. 

That story one would, indeed, pass over, but it 
is on its dark and forbidding background that the 
fair character of blessed Sir Thomas More stands 
out in all of its nobility and steadfastness. 

There does not appear to be any very certain 
account of the beginning of the king's attachment 
to the unfortunate mother of Elizabeth, but it is 
of all such unlawful affairs the one which has had 
the most frightful and lasting effect upon mankind, 
dragging down to its malign results millions of 
innocent beings and giving the very history of the 
world a sinister bent from which it is only now 
beginning slowly to recover. How horrible that the 
base amours of one vile Tudor monster should have 



no Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

cut off from the Church of God so many souls and 
plunged the British people into the wretched state 
of schism, irreligion and bigotry in which we find 
them for so long. That merry dance at old Sir 
Thomas Boleyne's house, to which the jovial king 
went to escape the weariness of court — that dance 
with the young daughter of his host, in which the 
fatal fires of uttermost dishonor were enkindled — 
that dance of death ! Had that dance of hell not been 
danced, there would have been no ''reformation" 
in England, Ireland would have been spared centu- 
ries of persecution and the glorious old minsters 
and abbeys and cathedrals of England would still 
belong to the God in whose honor they were built. 
But it was danced, and from adultery to Protestant 
rebellion is always a quick step. Reformers 
usually begin by modifying the ten commandments. 
Luther and Henry began alike. 

With the king's determination to take up with 
the pretty wanton begins the most amazing and 
monstrous debauching of a race and prostitution 
of all principles of justice and decency that this 
long-suffering globe has ever been called upon to 
endure. 

The absolutely transparent hypocrisy of the 
king (who only yesterday was the champion of the 
Pope) did not prevent the truckling universities and 



B. Sir Thomas More 1 1 1 

cringing prelates from blasphemously justifying 
open adultery by the very Scriptures, and declaring 
it to be the will of Christ. 

Think of those solemn old hypocrites at Oxford 
actually taking months to investigate the matter 
of the king's divorce — just a plain case of desire for 
a new and younger wife — and then, with such a 
show of canonical and legal learning as never was, 
assuring His Majesty that if there was one thing 
above another than heaven demanded that he do, 
on pain of sin, was (oh, ye powers!) marry Anne, 
or anybody else, for that matter. 

"We never saw the moon so fair." So said the 
universities ; so also said the Simonious ecclesiastics 
fattening upon the revenues robbed by the king 
from the religious orders. What possible objection 
could such a sycophant and vile wretch as Cranmer 
raise to any little peccadilloes of the king? So, with 
all heads wagging, and all thumbs up, poor Cath- 
erine is flung aside, and the merry marriage bells 
ring for the royal nuptials. 

Consider Cranmer unctuously pronouncing 
over the royal paramours : "Those whom God hath 
joined together let no man put asunder." It must 
have been difhcult for even a finished liar like him- 
self to keep from laughing. And the worst of it 
was that, now that the king had got into the knack 



1 1 2 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

of marrying, he kept his poor Archbishop busy 
declaring him indissolubly united to a new woman 
every little while. 

But while the populace feasted on cakes and ale 
and whole sides of good old English beef, and the 
universities kept glib opinions constantly in stock 
(guaranteed to fit any king) ; and comfortable Epis- 
copal dignitaries, with comely wives and favorites, 
stood ready to furnish royal divorce with neatness 
and dispatch, and re-marriages while you wait — 
during this Saturnalia of vice and degradation in 
the name of religion, there was one voice in Eng- 
land that yet refused to tell the king that in the 
utter blackness of that night of shame the moon 
or any other light was shining. 

More had, indeed, turned on that honest Chelsea 
heel of his, and bluntly told the king the ugly truth. 
And then began the most tremendous efforts on 
the king's part to win the countenance of his great 
Chancellor. 

When the last history of man's nobility shall 
have been written, there will be found no brighter 
pages in all its splendid story than the account of 
Thomas More's stand, single-handed, against his 
age, his country and his king. He brushed aside 
the sophistries of the two universities; he flung 
their own old lessons back at the apostate bishops ; 



B. Sir'vThomas More 1 1 3 

he spurned the princely offers of the king ; he faced, 
with perfectly sublime courage, the gathering 
blackness of his total ruin and death. And all for 
what? Simply because he said that, as a CathoHc, 
he could not yield a principle of morals. There is 
a world of meaning in Henry's untiring effort to 
secure, if not the open, positive approval of Sir 
Thomas, at least his silence and negative counte- 
nance. He had accompHshed his purpose, he had 
married Anne Boleyne, he had the clergy in his 
pay and power. But he, poor wretch, seemed to 
feel desperately the need of the good wishes of 
some one not as base as he — to have the friendship 
of just one true man. 

So, even after there was no need to have the 
approval or countenance of anyone for any horrible 
butchery or lust that his black heart might hatch, 
the king continued to attempt to win back More. 

Disguised as a waterman, at dead of night, he 
goes to Chelsea. The light is burning in the 
scholar's room. An apple flung up at the casement 
brings More in the dark, and these two men pace 
up and down till day-break fighting it out. But 
the Lord Chancellor has not forgotten the awful 
oath he took on first assuming the ofilice. So, 
though he knows it must mean the final blow, he 
shakes the king off, boldly declaring: "Your 



114 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Majesty has robbed himself and me of a sound 
night's sleep. And to no purpose. The whys and 
wherefores of Thomas More, rate-payer in this old 
parish, can matter little to anyone, and least of all 
to Your Majesty, who has the approbation of 
learned universities and the blessing of bishops. 
What ekes it, therefore, what I, plain Thomas 
More, may or may not think? But if Your Majesty 
has come to inquire of the Lord Chancellor of 
England concerning the matter of the divorce, then 
may it please Your Majesty to hear. I summon 
you to appear before our Court at Westminster at 
ten of the clock to-morrow, and then, as though 
Your Majesty were but the humblest wight in all 
Your Majesty's kingdom, I shall give judgment on 
your cause in strict accord with my own good con- 
science; for that were indeed a thing too pitiful, 
to wit, that the first man that ever failed to get full 
justice for his cause in my high court should be 
my king. Count on the truth, Your Majesty, from 
me at all times." The king did not appear. 

When we remember the colossal fortunes which 
Henry heaped upon his tools and the almost pa- 
thetic longing for More's friendship — which never 
died out— we may form some estimate of the 
pressure of temptation to which the great heart of 
Sir Thomas must have been constantly subjected. 



B. Sir Thomas More 115 

And the circumstances were such as to have 
given a conscience less exquisitely attuned than 
his broad grounds for entertaining genuine doubt 
as to its dictates. Had not the most learned men 
in the country, after exhaustive discussion and 
research, declared that there was nothing in the 
canon law to prevent the divorce under the existing 
circumstances? More was but a layman, and had 
not the two archbishops and the clerical Houses 
of Convocation — surely better able to determine 
matters of conscience than he — also declared in 
favor of the divorce? And, again, the king did not 
require that More give any formal approval, but 
simply that he do not oppose it. It would require 
no very far-fetched casuistry to find a loop-hole in 
such conditions, for an escape from ignominy and 
death. 

But the inexorable conscience of the brave old 
Chancellor set over against the quibbling of the 
lawyers the plain, unvarnished ten commandments 
and his own sense of honor; and as against the 
fawning, manifestly interested complacency of the 
English bishops, he was content to take his stand 
by the side of unflinching Rome. 

Continuing, at the king's insistence, to hold 
the Lord High Chancellorship, Sir Thomas More 



ii6 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

comes at this period of his life to occupy the most 
pathetic and subhme position ever known in Eng- 
Hsh history. 

Around him everything is passing rapidly with- 
out the pale of that old Church which he knew 
well was the one source and guarantee of a people's 
greatness and which he loved with a romantic 
enthusiasm. 

Men who had taught him truth as a little child 
he now saw bartering their very souls and selling 
those same truths for the filthy mess of a foul king's 
favor. The Merry England of his boyish love and 
manhood's devotion, as if in very deed possessed 
of the Evil Spirit, was floundering in crimes 
unspeakable and wallowing in the mire of spiritual 
abominations, sacrilege and apostasy. The stout 
crusader that he was, More must have felt how 
utterly the age had ceased to be a possible theatre 
for men like him to live and fight in. Indeed, there 
runs through his later words that constant note of 
one whO' feels that they have cast him for no role 
in the new drama, and whose heroic costume looks 
strangely out of place amid the buffoons and the 
clowns and baser fellows that seem to be about to 
hold the center of the stage. No more terrible 
count in England's long indictment is found than 
this, that Thomas More had come to seem incon- 
gruous among his fellow countrymen. 



B. Sir Thomas More 1 1 7 

The havoc proceeds, and Henry begins to add 
a series of monstrous legal murders (of his own 
queens) to the list of his other atrocities. 

Tiring of his loosely-formed matrimonial co- 
partnerships, and having discovered that — for a 
price — the ten commandments can be modified by 
one's own archbishops, and black proved white by 
one's own Oxford, the merry monarch fell to cut- 
ting off the heads of his queens and crowning the 
fair successor — whom he was always prudent 
enough to have, as it were, on cold storage against 
any sudden emergency. 

And, of course, the breach between him and his 
Lord Chancellor widens. Nor is far-off Rome 
indififerent to what is happening in that Walpurgis 
Night which we now style "the English Reforma- 
tion." 

Warnings, entreaties, fulminations had been 
entirely wasted upon the brutal sensualist frenzied 
by lust and on the vultures hovering above the rich 
repast of despoiled monasteries and convents which 
the brute promised them in return for their souls. 

At last the king decided that it was time that 
his precious new church should have a head. What 
better head could it have than the king himself? 
And, as a matter of fact, Henry was certainly an 
expert on heads. So once more to ask our dear. 



ii8 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

complacent bishops and our wise universities what 
they think of the moon! Tomes are ransacked, 
treatises written, interminable debates are holden; 
and then — with perfectly straight faces, too — the 
bishops and the universities both assure the king 
that they never saw the moon so fair. Isn't that 
delicious? So here we are with our own church, 
our own head for it, and as many wives as you 
choose. No Popery! Long live the glorious 
Reformation, and the church as by Parliament es- 
tablished, and divorce and murder and Simony and 
robbery — and all our "Anglo-Saxon" liberties. 
' And the Lord High Chancellor has resigned. 
He has fled from the stage upon the very begin- 
ning of this second act of the Devil's Drama. But, 
strange to say, the king does not allow him to 
depart without a final effort to secure his silence 
and negative support. To no avail, of course; for 
More shakes off the leprous touch of the king's 
hand in such a way as to prepare us for the last 
hurrying episodes before the awful tragedy comes 
to its bloody end. Those who knew the character 
of the two men felt that it could now be but a 
question of how and when the king might finally 
decide to destroy the one man whom he had loved 
but could not — after his own fall had made it neces- 
sary — debauch or corrupt. 



B. Sir Thomas More 119 

Presently the curtain is rung up for the last act, 
and, the magnificent climax being about to arrive, 
More meets it as only a saint and knight and 
staunch good fellow can. Clapped into the Tower 
upon the farcical charge of high treason, he had 
almost twelve months in which to loosen the tender 
and therefore tenacious ties that bind a man of fine 
feeling and true heart to so much that is worthy of 
it all in this sad world. 

A year, lacking a few days only. More lay there 
in that Tower that has contained so much that was 
heroic at the sublimest crises of England's life. 

And daily came his beloved daughter Margaret 
to cheer him from without by talking to him 
through the high window of his cell. 

And it was in this dungeon that his imperish- 
able sense of humor so often rescued him from the 
almost inevitable temptation to despair. As, for 
example, when chiding his daughter for pitying 
him so, he cried: ''Fie, foolish child, that you 
should call this place of opportunity such evil 
names. Why, Madge, my child, these were the 
first eleven months of quiet that I have had in 
years; but, but don't tell your mother, child" (the 
mother being More's second wife, a woman much 
older than himself and of a peppery temper and 
tireless tongue, who one may conceive to have been 



1 20 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

suffered to marry the good Sir Thomas to prove 
him — putting up uncomplainingly with her — a 
saint beyond all cavil. 

Seriously enough that prison was a ''place of 
opportunity" for the great soul that waited and 
prepared itself from day to day for the supreme 
sacrifice that was to seal a life of splendid manhood 
and make it possible for Englishmen for evermore 
to claim one moment and one man whose moral 
grandeur and spiritual greatness cannot be dimmed 
by any story of man at his sublimest best in any 
age or clime. 

At last the plotting and the intrigue had been 
sufficiently advanced to make some show of decent 
legal process against the prisoner in the Tower, 
who, notwithstanding the general apostasy, was 
still the most beloved man of the people. His 
enemies knew this, and no one knew it better than 
the king. Henry would have been glad, indeed, if 
some way might have been discovered to save 
More's life and at the same time the royal dignity. 

The charge was treason, the body of his crime 
consisting in certain seditious and treasonable writ- 
ings and words wherein it was alleged More had 
at sundry times declared the king no head of 
Christ's true Church, and item, sundry pernicious 
utterances pertaining to the king's divorce. 



B. Sir Thomas More 1 2 1 

To these Sir Thomas entered a general plea of 
''Not guilty," basing his defense (which he of 
course realized was entirely useless) upon the per- 
fectly consistent argument that he had certainly 
expressed to His Majesty and others his scruples 
of conscience on these two points, as any free 
Christian man might do; but that he had neither 
done nor abetted any the least acts or opinions 
treasonable against the king's majesty, whose loyal 
and tried liege servant he was prepared to prove 
himself against all comers. To the attacks of his 
lay enemies More gave the very point of his tre- 
mendous lance of outraged scorn; but it was his 
reverent and pitying demeanor toward the eccle- 
siastics that must have burned into the very quick 
of their right reverend and wrong reverend con- 
sciences, seared though they were. 

What a dramatic and awful contrast that be- 
tween a brave and doomed lay champion of the 
Church, about to die for his unflinching fealty to 
truth, and these ordained ecclesiastics, sitting in 
Judas judgment on him for being true to that 
which they had been made priests to teach, but 
which they had now sold for money and power and 
lust. 

The sentence of the court was death. The 
greatest head in England was ordered to be cut 



122 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

off at day-break of the morrow and his poor body 
quartered and put upon the four corners of the 
walls of London. 

The wretched king meanwhile was straining 
every point to save his old best friend, and there 
is reason to believe that once or twice a straw of 
hope seemed almost strong enough to float success 
upon. 

If only More could be prevailed upon to let the 
belief be spread that he had changed his mind. 
Just that — to let it be thought that he had yielded 
to the royal pleasure. He need say nothing, do 
nothing against his stubborn conscience, if he 
would only suffer the false impression to get abroad 
that he had at last submitted, like a good, com- 
fortable man and sound friend that he was, and 
joined the universal company of prudent chaps who 
ate the king's bread in snug contentment, asking- 
no questions for conscience sake. Surely, the king 
held, the man might do that much to save his neck 
and the royal stomach from this last bit of villainy 
at which it threatened to revolt. But More had 
learned his ethics at too old a school and had not 
the advantage of a ''reformed" conscience. 

Once, through a bit of humor, the king almost 
had his way, and it was for too brief a time cur- 



B. Sir Thomas More 123 

rently believed that the beloved Chancellor had 
been restored to the king's favor, and, of course, 
to life. 

Maddened by the stupidity of his advisers, who 
were unable to suggest escape from the impending 
and inevitable catastrophy, Henry at last found one 
of his tried councillors who was prepared to get the 
stout and obdurate prisoner to change his mind. 
And thus it fell. Sir Thomas had ever been smooth- 
shaven as a priest until his long imprisonment, when, 
having no razors, his beard had grown and now fell 
in quite a venerable sweep over his breast. Not 
long before his execution, sitting one morning in 
his prison cell, he was jocosely holding high debate 
as to his shaving off his beard or keeping it on the 
day he should be seen by his old friends for the last 
time upon the scafifold. 'TU take it ofif," quoth 
he, "and then my friends shall see me die as I had 
lived amongst them. Nay, that were not kind. 
I'll leave it on, and so mask my last agony from 
loving eyes. But stay, that were a coward's trick, 
and men might say 'he was ashamed.' I'll take it 
off — no, I will leave it on." Thus did the heart, 
unterrified by the approach of death, relieve the 
darkness by lighter, playful thoughts. And, as it 
happened, just at that moment came the king's 
messenger to beg that he do change his mind ; and 



124 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

More, his thoughts still running on about his beard 
and willing to have a jest, said that he had that 
very day changed his mind. Catching at the hope 
eagerly, the king's commissioner hurried away, and 
the news that the beloved Lord Chancellor was 
not to die but was restored to the king's favor ran 
quickly about the country and called forth so gen- 
uine and wide-spread enthusiasm that the advisers 
of His Majesty feared more than ever the possible 
results of the execution when it should take place. 

We know, alas, that the too sanguine courtier 
was sadly mistaken, and that Sir Thomas More was 
made of that sterner stuff that does not "change." 
His daughter knew this also ; for when the gallant 
fellow hastened to tell her that it had pleased the 
king to pardon her father, she cried out: "And 
why hath the king done so, my lord?" "Because," 
he answered, "your father hath changed his mind." 
Whereat the lady drew herself up as a true child 
of such a father should, and, looking straight into 
the eye of the king's henchman, said fiercely : "My 
lord, you lie. My father hath not changed his 
mind — or, if he hath, he is no more my father." 

So, on the day appointed the tragic end was 
reached, and, as the king had said, the martyr's 
blood did sow a crop in England's soil of which 
no man has yet seen the last or the most telling 
fruit. 



B. Sir Thomas More 125 

The harrowing details are well known to the 
most casual student of Eng-lish history. The way 
in which brave men face death is human nature's 
chief claim to greatness; and when, as in More's 
case, the issue and the principle for which the awful 
sacrifice is made is just one's inability to tell a lie 
— to truckle to a dominant and popular misstate- 
ment — or to keep silent in the face of general 
apostasy, it seems to me that men are not permit- 
ted by their very nature to climb much higher the 
glorious heights of moral grandeur. To brave that 
terrible ordeal in any fashion were heroism enough, 
but to approach it, as did More, with the light- 
hearted unconsciousness of being at all beyond any 
plain man's plain duty ; to die with the same inno- 
cence of moral superiority with which one would 
discharge the simplest duty of the daily round; 
to be surprised that anyone should even consider 
any other course than telling the blunt truth — this 
lifts our saint at once to a sublime height, truly. 
And yet (and this is his peculiar usefulness to us 
hum-drum, plain plodders in the toil of life) it is 
a virtue and a type of strength native to our condi- 
tion and having hourly opportunity for exercise. 

The day at last arrived, and More was led forth 
from his cell to die. Turning the corner of the 
Tower in passing to the scaffold, he was distressed 



126 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

to meet his daughter, Margaret Roper, who, fall- 
ing on her knees, begged his last blessing. Hold- 
ing her dear, sweet face between his hands, he 
looked down yearningly into her eyes and said: 
''This is not kind of you. You should have let 
your daddy die as I have tried to live — bravely, 
my child. Go, daughter, go yonder behind the 
Tower, where I shall not see you, and you will 
know, when a hush falls on the people, that your 
old father has passed beyond the voices of this 
w^eary world forever." She went, and in a short 
space she knew — not by the deep hush that fell 
upon all present, but by a signal more terrible than 
that appalling silence. When the axe fell the sev- 
ered head rolled down the slight declivity and the 
poor child saw the glazed eyes of her beloved 
father looking up ghastly at her from the hacked, 
mangled head. It was all over. A plain, true man 
had died for the one faith of Jesus Christ — that 
was all. Simply one more to add to the long bead- 
roll of those of whom the world is not worthy, but 
who shall rest forever on the Heart of God. 

Called on to pass through intellectual and spir- 
itual temptations and trials which in their subtlety 
and scope resemble those of our own times, Blessed 
Sir Thomas More has given to the faithful layman 
of today a model no less timely than fascinating. 



B. Sir Thomas More 



127 



The church could scarcely have done anything 
more illustrative of her divine insight and preter- 
natural wisdom than the selection of this man at 
this time for those high honors that focus the at- 
tention and stir the emulative love of her children. 




Ctje Mtstinv of €xin. 




THE DESTINY OF ERIN. 



NOT long ago a good old friend of mine met 
me for the first time since my conversion 
to the Catholic faith, and naturally the conversa- 
tion turned upon that most momentous step of my 
life. Chancing to ask about my present occupa- 
tion, he learned that I v^as on that very evening 
going to speak upon the Destiny of Erin, and, 
with a delicious start, he exclaimed : "Good heav- 
ens, man! I knew you had turned Catholic, but 
have you turned Irish, too?" And the beauty of 
the humor is, that a very great and glorious sug- 
gestion of a truth lies back of it. As far as I know 
there is no strain of Irish blood to which I may lay 
claim, and I confess with sorrow that until I became 
a Catholic I was pathetically ignorant of much in 
Irish character and life, knowledge which has 
now become a source of endless joy and inspiration 
to me. As my former friends fell from me after 
my "apostasy," Almighty God raised up new Irish 
ones to take their places; and, with no wish to 



132 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

reflect upon the noble souls who once did honor 
me by calling me their friend, I must in candor 
say that I am not the poorer by the change. 

In countless ways, which must forevermore 
make me their bankrupt debtor, my new-found 
friends of Irish parentage or birth unfolded to my 
mind the deep and rich storehouse of sympathy, 
emotion, romance, pathos, devotion, faith, patriot- 
ism and humor that make the race the fascinating 
study that they are to us of nature less complex and 
more phlegmatic. I plunged at once into the study 
of Irish history, and eagerly embraced all oppor- 
tunities for coming to know the scattered children 
of old Erin as they are. 

And the result, ladies and gentlemen, of that 
awakened interest on my part was the lecture which 
it is now my privilege to deliver before you. 

The Destiny of Erin : What is it to be? What 
future awaits a race with such a romantic and 
heroic past? Have nations and peoples a destiny 
at all, in any such sense as individuals have? And 
what is destiny, after all? 

By destiny we mean that sublime something 
which God has in his mind when from the void of 
nothing he creates a being whose life, like God's 
own, is to be eternal. The very reason of things, 
no less than the lessons of religion, compel us to 



The Destiny of Erin 133 

believe that infinite intelligence engaged in so stu- 
pendous and glorious a work as the creation of an 
immortal being, must have in view the filling by 
that creature of some especial, personal and vital 
end, the realization of which end or destiny must 
be the meaning of "salvation." That I have some- 
thing incommunicably mine, something that makes 
me myself, something that crowns my individuality 
with the supreme prerogative of having the ability 
and the opportunity to be and do that which no 
other, however great, can be or do ! That man has 
this no one can question. Of all the countless multi- 
tudes of human beings no two have looked alike, no 
two have been alike. Something (call it expression 
or what you like) each has had that nobody else had 
or could have. Though one describe to a third 
party an unknown friend's appearance, and give 
a detailed, eloquent and accurate account of eyes, 
mouth, hair, nose, stature, etc. — when one is seen, 
and not before, does the real look fix itself upon 
the fancy. We then know the man's expression; 
his personality looks out at us through the thin 
mask of features. And just as no two men have 
ever looked alike, so, also, no two souls have ever 
been alike, either in their possibilities or powers. 
And, therefore, if destiny be found to be the reach- 
ing toward and the fulfilling of that eternal end 



134 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

which infinite wisdom and infinite love proposed 
for the individual, it follows that happiness and fife 
consist in knowing and achieving one's true des- 
tiny. How easily we speak of men in this respect. 
We say of one, that he has missed his calling; of 
another, that he is perfectly fulfilling his. We state 
that someone could have been this or that; that 
they spoiled a good farmer when they made that 
one a poor lawyer; that A, instead of having 
become a doctor, should have become a priest; 
that B was "cut out" for a sailor. By all this we 
simply mean that destiny for many men so plainly 
indicates itself that anyone can see whether or not 
in their case it is being accomplished. This is 
especially easy after a man is dead. When the 
books are finally closed; when the sum total of a 
fife may be computed; when the unexpected 
changes of which our wondrous nature is so capa- 
ble can no longer suddenly alter the whole current 
and bearing of a man — then we can speak as with 
authority of his "success" or "failure," by which 
is meant his having attained his destiny or other- 
wise. 

While he is still alive any dogmatic judgment 
on these points is rather premature, because thieves 
sometimes die, converted on the very cross on 



The Destiny of Erin 135 

which they pay the awful penalty of a misspent life ; 
and, vice versa, the ''good" come sometimes to an 
unspeakably atrocious end. 

Yes, individuals have destiny beyond a doubt; 
but have the races, also? The philosophical his- 
torian can scarcely question it. Indeed, the casual 
student who thinks a moment can see that the great 
peoples of the past stand out, as clearly destined 
to do and be a something peculiarly their own as 
individuals themselves do. And, again, in their 
case, as in that of all persons, the nations that are 
dead furnish the most indubitable proofs of this. 

Their course is run. The total of their effect 
upon the world may now be scientifically measured. 
The niche in which they were "cut out" to stand 
is there, and so are they, and we can calculate the 
margin, if there be one, between God's vast out- 
lines of destiny and their palpable realization by 
these old peoples dead and gone. We have, there- 
fore, only to sit like philosophic Hamlets among 
the graves and broken monuments, deciphering the 
epitaphs and records engraved in their dead 
tongues, to come at something Hke a just concep- 
tion of their great destiny. 

For a moment let us look back at two or three 
of those old formerly so potent factors in the world's 
development. 



136 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

The Greeks, in many ways the most interesting 
people of antiquity, will remain, as long as history 
records anything, the great exemplifiers of form. 

All "the glory that was Greece" lay in that 
charming fact. It was they that taught us all Jiozv 
to do, think, feel and express. In architecture, 
literature, science and philosophy we yet base all 
our principles upon the immortal teachings of their 
great minds. There were, of course, other old races 
to whom art, poetry and thought Avere not by any 
means unknown ; but the distinction of the Greek 
was that he excelled in these, he lived in these, he 
incarnated beauty, and by the very force of deeply- 
drawn instinct, achieved the most and best of which 
our human nature is ever to be found capable. 

The orator must learn the rules of eloquence 
and rhetoric from the Greeks, the poet his figures, 
the artist his ideals. Amid the very pathos of her 
ruins Greece still shows forth a beauty so exquisite 
that all the world takes off its shoes from its feet, 
feeling itself to be on holy ground. 

The Doctors of the Church in mediaeval times 
harked back to Aristotle for the bones of logic on 
which in deathless form they sought to put the 
flesh and sinews of the Christian Truth. 

The "Logos" of Greek philosophers furnished 
St. John himself with an apt figure immediately 



The Destiny of Erin 137 

understandable for his development of the stupen- 
dous mystery of ''the Word made flesh." 

St. Paul, the mightiest exponent of truth in 
terms of reason, found the whole intellectual world 
prepared (by Greek precision and Greek thought) 
for his magnificent elucidation of the Gospel. 

In short, the Greeks fulfilled their glorious des- 
tiny when they showed man the measureless domain 
of his intelligence ; and then, when school was out, 
the schoolmaster lay down for his eternal rest. 
The Greeks are passed away forever; but their 
teaching lives. To-morrow, when the teacher 
bends above the child to guide its hands to trace 
the perfect lines of truth and beauty, the child will 
not see it — no, nor the teacher either — but Greece 
will hold the teacher's wrist, and all of symmetry 
and right proportion that shall ensue will be her 
work. 

Now, side by side with that great race there 
lived another. Rome rose upon her seven hills at 
the same time as Athens upon her height of match- 
less intellectual splendor. And Rome, indeed, pos- 
sessed her thinkers, poets, her scientists and archi- 
tects and men of commanding genius. But what 
we think of when we say ''the Romans" is alto- 
gether different from that which comes into the 
mind when we say "the Greeks," for Rome did that 



138 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

which Athens did not and could not do. The 
sahent Roman feature is not the abstract mind nor 
mind expressing life in perfect form, but power — 
power to conquer, power to rule, power to domi- 
nate and build. The Greeks thought out the 
principles, the Romans applied them practically. 
Greece was the school and Rome the market-place, 
the courts, the barracks, the workshop of the an- 
tique world. 

Greece was the professor, Rome the policeman ; 
Greece taught man how to think, Rome drilled, 
not man, but men, into the orderly and compact 
thing we call Society ; Greece breathed the motive 
of civilizing truth into man's mind, Rome formu- 
lated institutions, laws, government, authority; 
Greece perfected the individual, Rome banded indi- 
viduals into well regulated bodies. 

So, while the one was getting ready the intellect 
and heart, the other was elaborating that system 
of human policy in which mankind beholds itself 
as a vast, complex, but unified society or family. 

Just as the deathless principles of Greek philos- 
ophy were found to be the very base required by 
Christian theologians for the erection of the great 
body of scientifically stated dogmatic truths, so 
also was the vast Roman Empire, that drew all of 
the then known world into relationship, found to 



The Destiny of Erin [39 

be the very theatre in which the stupendous Trag- 
edy of Calvary would have the whole race for its 
audience, and, as ''all roads lead to Rome," it was 
to that Eternal City that the Apostles turned to 
set the first poor, feeble beginnings of that King- 
dom — not of this world — which was to displace the 
mighty Empire of the Caesars who had through 
centuries been building, though they dreamed this 
not, the throne for the successors of St. Peter, from 
which, at our own distant day, the Sovereign Pon- 
tiff rules a world whose kingdoms have become the 
kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. 

There was, again, a third old race contempo- 
raneous with the Greeks and Romans, which, in- 
deed, still survives commingled with many others 
of these modern times, but whose glory and whose 
name passed away forever upon the destruction 
of the Temple. The Jew had also his sublime and 
vital destiny. There, from the holy hill of Sion, 
for a thousand years, while Greece was witnessing 
the evolution of the intellect under her guiding 
genius, and Rome the marshaling of human forces 
into society, Jerusalem was testifying to the one 
true God, and reminding the soul of man that 
beauty and power are, in their last analysis, spir- 
itual and not material. While Greece shaped the 
intelligence and Rome the arm, Jerusalem prepared 



140 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

the heart for the coming of the Truth. Her 
Prophets pointed above the world, and kept man 
from forgetting that ''the things which are not seen 
are eternal." 

So, then, when the Greek had forged the word 
and the thought, and the Roman had drawn the 
whole world into a unified Empire, a gentle little 
Daughter of the House of David brought forth 
her Son, — ''the way, the truth and the life," — and 
the Destiny of the three great peoples of the ancient 
world was marvelously fulfilled. Requiescant in 
pace! 

Of the dead we can speak finalty. It is more 
difficult to determine the destiny of those still, as 
we say, alive and kicking ! But some of the modern 
nations and races have now sufficiently run out 
their course, so far matured into a type likely to 
persist, that we can quite definitely say what their 
apparent destiny is and whether they are fulfill- 
ing it. 

Certain distinct ideas come to the mind upon 
the very mention of the names of the several peo- 
ples. Of course, innumerable individuals might 
be found, whose blood being one thing, neverthe- 
less have characteristics pertaining to some other 
race; but the truth remains that Germans are 
different from the French, for instance, and that 



The Destiny of Erin 141 

an Englishman and an Irishman instinctively act, 
feel and think in absolutely dissimilar ways. An 
Italian and a Scandinavian (when left entirely by 
themselves and given equal and similar opportu- 
nity) will not in one case out of a thousand do the 
same thing. And so on through the whole list 
we might well show that there is a manifest, deeply 
rooted something within the very consciousness of 
men that impels them to move individually toward 
a national or racial Type or Norm. 

Look for a moment at a few of the character- 
istics of the modern nations. The French! What 
a sense of taste and elegance and etiquette and 
grace is aroused in us by anything French. We 
think at once that the "seasoning," at all events, 
will be toothsome, if the dish be French. One wag 
declared that he would prefer to have a Frenchman 
insult him than have an Englishman be "civil" to 
him — because the former would be so polite and 
elegant about it. Another begged a friend who 
said he had an idea not to tell Madame, "for she 
will make soup of it." Finger bowls, lingerie, 
epigrams, manners, perfumes, art, literature, tooth- 
brushes — what don't we owe the French? And all 
that is done, even to vice itself, is done exquisitely. 

On the other hand, look at the Germans! At 
once we think of soHdity, thoroughness, profundity. 



142 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

schwartz-brodt and plodding. You say French, 
and champagne comes to mind; German, and one 
thinks at once of beer! And away down under 
these trifling superficial dififerences lie the psycho- 
logical reasons why they exist. The Teuton digs 
deep to the foundations of life and knowledge ; the 
Gaul expresses truth and life in polished, perfect 
phrases which are much more than mere bonmots, 
being, indeed, no less than flash-light revelations 
thrust by the light of genius itself through the 
heart of truth. One tunnels with his nails the 
adamant of facts ; the other in an epigram sums up 
the verity his heavier and much more industrious 
German cousin has thus dug out. Then, too, there 
are the other nations. Emigrants landing in New 
York display the tendencies which shaped the pres- 
ent face of Europe. Tony at once begins his 
American career by selling fruit or grinding the 
arias from Verdi and Donizetti on a barrel organ ; 
but Pat is on the police force in an incredibly short 
time and boss of his election district in a month 
or two ! And far av/ay in sunny Italy the very 
peasant watches the sunset with an artist's eye and 
sings the exquisite music of the great Masters. 
The thrifty Hollander and the procrastinating 
Spaniard are unlike, one only happy when she is 
scrubbing something, the other feeling that almost 
anything can better be done manana! Whence 



The Destiny of Erin 143 

these profound distinctions? Believe me, from the 
same ethnical, essential sources that from the first 
made Spain the land of theology, mysticism, reli- 
gious art and "feeling for its own sake," and Hol- 
land practical, sane, economical, clean — scrubbed! 
It would be interesting to speculate as to the des- 
tiny to be worked out by the American when once 
the present process of "mixing" shall have been 
completed, but, of course, it is much too soon. 

Well, then, nations have, it would certainly seem, 
a destiny. And if this be so, can we believe that 
one race — a race, moreover, so full of salient char- 
acteristics, so gifted, so sublime in endurance, so 
heroic in virtue as the Irish is destitute of a destiny? 
Is it credible to suppose that Erin alone has not 
that some one thing to do, that some one thing to 
be, which no one else could do or be, which is her 
own by destiny? I cannot think it. 

What is the destiny of Erin? What is the glo- 
rious task set for her doing by the Eternal Shaper 
of all things? For what have Erin's tears been 
flowing for centuries? To what supreme end have 
her immeasurable sacrifices tended? Whom was 
it that her smile was sent to cheer? For what did 
her heart break, then bear, then break and bear 
again? Scattered all over the green earth, surely 
her children must have a work to do all their own 



144 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

— a purpose to accomplish in the magnificent 
development of God's designs. 

Let us imagine Michael Angelo painting one 
of his glorious frescoes, the subject to be no less 
than the Eternal One dispensing the various 
Crowns of Destiny to the Sisters of the Nations. 

Upon the graceful head of France God has just 
placed the exquisitely wrought crown in filigree 
gold work, studded with priceless gems — the crown 
of Taste and Elegance; Germany, strong and su- 
perb, stands crowned with the plain, undecorated, 
iron crown of Thought. Italy, receiving a crown 
of Art, is given also a palette and a lyre. Above 
Spain's head (she gets no crown save this) there 
hangs a Sanctuary Lamp, and her commission is 
to Witness to the Tabernacled Life. Now, the 
picture, as we see it, shows lovely Erin kneeling 
to receive her Destiny. I ask, has God no more 
crowns? Has this fair Sister, as she kneels there, 
radiant with love and duty, no one thing to be 
given her to be and do? Watch! And prepare to 
see a holy and an awful sight. God stoops and 
whispers. Erin looks up, and the smile and the 
tear already on her face, she bows, like another 
Mary, to accept her Destiny. What is it? A 
crown? No! The emblems of the arts and sci- 
ences? No! What, then? A Cross! A ponder- 



The Destiny of Erin 145 

ous Cross of suffering and persecution for the 
truth's sake. This may pain you, my good Irish 
friend down there; but believe me, it was because 
Erin did get and did accept this strange and glo- 
rious destiny that Catholicity today owes a simply 
immeasurable part of its world-embracing advance. 
Erin agreed to keep the Faith — and she has kept 
it ! Though her blood has run like rivers, though 
her land has been devastated, though her children 
have been exiled, though her rights have been 
wrung from her by tyrants, though at any moment 
she might have been spared all this by mere apos- 
tasy, she has (may God for evermore reward her) 
— she has sublimely kept the Faith! To suffer in 
order that others might know the truth, to suffer 
in order that others might be blessed — such is the 
destiny of Erin. Let us consider so sublime a task. 

The conversion of Ireland to the Christian 
religion was one of the most dramatic and mirac- 
ulous events in the history of Europe. 

UnHke some of the other races, the Irish be- 
came Christians, as it were, at once and without 
those painful steps usually required in the evolution 
of a people from paganism to Christian civilization. 

And from the very first their faith was of that 
aggressive and zealous sort that does not rest 
passively content in the negative enjoyment of 



146 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

great blessings, but that yearns actively to impart 
a knowledge of those blessings to those that know 
them not. Thus the Irish were missionaries in 
many portions of Europe at a time when the 
Church was barely able to gain a precarious foot- 
hold even in places very much nearer the center 
of her life at Rome. Far off there, on the very 
edge of the known world, a distant outpost scarcely 
reachable at all, Erin from the first moment of her 
becoming Christian was a source of inspiration, 
learning and zeal to all other parts of the Church. 
And one magnificent peculiarity was hers. Pope 
after Pope was caused the gravest anxiety by 
rumors of defection and the spread of heresy in 
almost every other quarter from time to time. The 
fair valleys of France herself, ''the eldest daughter 
of the Church," were, as we know, sown most 
unhappily with the pestiferous seeds of Albigen- 
seean and other heresies ; Germany more than once 
was invaded by the preachers of false doctrines, 
Huss, John of Prague, and later the monster Lu- 
ther having done frightful havoc among the faith- 
ful; England went down before the tyrant Henry 
VHI. into fatal heresy and schism; Scotland lis- 
tened to the sophistries of Knox, the disciple of 
Calvin, who had already accomplished the seduc- 
tion of so many in Switzerland and France; Hoi- 



The Destiny of Erin 147 

land, Scandinavia, portions of Italy itself — at one 
time or another all grieved the Vicar of Jesus 
Christ at Rome. 

But since St. Patrick won Erin to the one true 
Faith no Pope has ever had to sorrow over the 
news that the Church in Ireland was being led 
astray. No ! Never has Erin swerved a hair's 
breadth from her sublime destiny; she has glo- 
riously ''kept the Faith," in the face of an unceasing 
and diabolical persecution which only her loyalty 
and steadfastness could have borne so long. 

How can we account for such superb adherence 
to so tremendous a destiny? When we send forth 
our children to their life-work, loving them how- 
ever much, and anxious in the highest degree that 
they go forth equipped and prepared, we are but 
human and finite, both in intelligence and re- 
sources ; so that we are frequently not able to give 
our children the things they need, or, possibly, we 
encourage them to venture on a career for which 
they may be but illy adapted. 

But with the Father, infinite both in his knowl- 
edge of his children and his love for them, it is not 
so. God fits us for our destiny before He bids us 
essay it. And when He gave to Erin the ponderous 
cross of suffering he did not fail to see that she 
must have peculiar gifts and graces in order to 



148 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

acquit herself with honor and success in the terrific 
conflict which it involved. Yes, Almighty God, in 
ways that make the heart leap with thanksgiving, 
"is good to the Irish" ! Give me a moment in 
which I may ask you to think of the weapons and 
faculties, as it were, that God gave to Erin when 
He asked her to undertake such a destiny. 

In the first place He gave the Irish heart its 
matchless sense of humor. Irish wit, so universally 
admired, was not a bit of sugar that slipped by 
accident into the salt and sorrow of the great, 
broken heart of the Irish people ! No ! It was put 
there by a divinely tender and gentle Heavenly 
Father. I venture to say that, if the Irish had not 
been the wittiest people, they could not have pos- 
sibly borne, as they have, the centuries of bitterness 
and wrong. An old writer declares, with good 
reason, that nobody can get to heaven without a 
sense of humor! And in the lives of Saints we 
frequently read that the most saintly have been 
those whose wit and keen enjoyment of the humor- 
ous was the greatest. It lifts a man out of the 
valleys. Despair dares not face one who is a wag, 
for it knows well that he is as likely as not to burst 
out into laughter straight in its face ! 

An Irishman sees something comical in the 
blackest situation, and as he stops to have his joke 



The Destiny of Erin 149 

over it he forgets about the bitter part. That is a 
very deeply significant story that they teh of one 
good son of Erin, and its lesson will be my excuse 
for repeating it now. 

It seems that the poor fellow was on a journey, 
and, being penniless, he had had nothing to eat for 
a day or two. So he trudged along disconsolately 
enough until he saw a charitable-looking old lady 
standing before a farm house. Approaching her, 
our friend stated his desperate condition, and the 
good heart of the lady was touched with pity. 
Bidding the man sit upon her door-step, she went 
into her kitchen and presently returned with a plate, 
on which Pat saw a fine, large piece of beef. The 
lady laid the meat before the starving man, de- 
lighted at the gladness that her act had evidently 
brought to the poor devil's heart. Pious man that 
he was, he closed his eyes for a moment to say a 
grace before eating, when, in that instant a dog 
came and ran away with the meat! Wait! That 
accident has nothing peculiarly Irish about it! 
This is the Hibernian touch in the story. When 
the man saw that the food was gone he said: 
"Well, thanks be to God! I've me appetite left, 
anyhow !" That is Irish. And what other man 
would say that, or could say it? Alas! time after 
time in history poor Erin has had little more than 



150 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

her "appetite" left; but she has always made it a 
subject of thanksgiving that that was left, that 
wondrous ''appetite" of hers to do and suffer for 
the spread of the true religion. 

It would be difficult to adequately value this 
unconquerable spirit of Irish wit, for it is the "sav- 
ing clause" in almost every Writ of doom. And 
its roots run down into the very heart of the Irish 
character, and thus it is that w^e find it so buoyant, 
so capable of "looking up," so "happy-go-lucky." 

But the smile has always been accompanied by 
the tear. The second of God's gifts to Erin was 
Pathos. Irish literature is never free from pathos, 
as Irish character is not. This striking feature 
manifests itself in many and always fascinating dif- 
ferent ways. Take, if you will, the poetry of Ire- 
land. It is romantic, frequently heroic or warlike ; 
but be its theme what it may be, it is never without 
a note of weird, intensely affecting pathos. Super- 
ficially considered this might seem to conflict with 
the spirit of mirth and wit of which we have already 
thought ; but only superficially. 

It is the combination of these two qualities that 
gives the Irish nature its unique interest. The poet 
sees not only the palpable beauty of his beloved 
one, but on past the flush of youth he foresees the 
decay of the fair face, the coming of wrinkles and 



The Destiny of Erin 151 

gray hairs; but (and here is where the pathos and 
the joyousness unite) he sees that the very fading 
of those '^young charms" has a beauty all its own, 
and that ''around the dear ruin" the thoughts of 
a heart that has ''truly loved" will cling "verdantly 
still." 

I doubt if in any other race's poetry one could 
come across the phrase "dear ruin." It is in its 
very essence Irish, and it is exquisite! It touches 
the deepest in a man's heart and glorifies loss, age, 
failure. 

The rose of mirth was placed in the fragile 
chalice of Erin's fancy, and tho' she has endeavored 
in vain to keep the roses fresh by watering them 
with her tears, let not her enemies imagine that all 
is lost when ruthless tyranny has crushed the price- 
less vase. For, thanks to God's miraculous endow- 
ment of her soul with smiles and tears, you may 
shatter, indeed, the vase at your will, "but the scent 
of the roses will hang 'round it still !" 

Altars the brutal soldiery of Cromwell could, 
indeed, destroy; they could not kill the faith in 
Erin's heart. They could burn down the humble 
cottage, but "Home" to the Irish was something 
that nothing could ever overthrow. They could 
break mothers' hearts, indeed, but they could not 
reach the undying love that those hearts contained. 



152 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

They could kill men, but not the rehgion which 
those men believed. They could banish and burn 
and bury, but they could not pervert. Oh, the tear 
and the smile! What have they not combined to 
do for God and the truth and country in Erin's 
blood-drenched land? Take, again, Irish music. 
It has many singularly beautiful pecuHarities, but 
its chief distinctive feature is the pathos of those 
cadences wherein the Irish song floats off in semi- 
tones into a wistful, sad, but exquisitely winsome 
pleading at the very heart of things. 

An Irish melody is not Hke those of any other 
folk. It is a dirge, but a dirge that invariably ends 
in the AUelulia of absolute belief in resurrection ! 
Other songs end in the dominant of a spirit that 
dares not venture far from actuality, even in music's 
bark; but the Irish songs end in a vague slipping 
off into mystic dreamlands — dreams, however, that 
the singer knows must come true. And the history 
of that people is one long story of pathos trans- 
figured by wit into magnificent endeavor. 

One more thing did God give to Erin by way 
of fitting her for her great destiny. He gave her 
that fierce, determined partisanship that makes of 
every Irishman a politician and an advocate. To 
fight for one's side is to the son of Erin an axio- 
matic duty requiring no discussion. And, while 



The Destiny of Erin 153 

this tendency creates the Donnybrook Fairs of 
doubtful benefit to anyone, and to a rather unnec- 
essary number of broken heads, there can be no 
question that to it also must be attributed that 
courage in scores of bloody battles in which the 
Irish have fought sublimely against tremendous 
odds, and the still more heroic courage they have 
manifested in the defense of their religion and their 
rights. Whether it be the Irish priest going to the 
stake for his God or the humble laborer of whom 
we are told that he refused higher wages because 
in his present job he was tearing down a Protestant 
church, the spirit is the same — one of enthusiasm 
under hardship, if the hardship, grave or slight, be 
''for the cause." Will you let me tell you a true 
story in illustration of this spirit of loyalty to one's 
party as shown by a good Irishman? 

In a certain great parish in a large Eastern city 
there had resided for many years two rival under- 
takers, whose establishments were adjoining and 
whose competition for the business of the parish 
was exceedingly sharp. These worthy rivals went 
by the name of Hart and Moran. To make their 
differences still more wide it happened that Mr. 
Hart was the RepubHcan ''boss" of the district, 
while Mr. Moran had the honor of leading the 
Democratic side in local politics. And, to make 



154 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

matters still worse, Mrs. Hart was the acknowl- 
edged leader of one social ''set" and Mrs. Moran 
of the other. So each man in the parish — and each 
woman, for that matter — was known as either a 
Moran man or a Hart man; and to one side of 
every question every respectable person felt bound 
to lend the weight of his vote, his influence or his 
stout right arm, if occasion should arise. 

Now it chanced that on a bitterly cold night a 
few years back a poor lad in the parish drank a drop 
too much and was found frozen to death in an old 
barn in the morning. The shocking news flew 
rapidly around the neighborhood, and soon the 
broken-hearted father of the boy was bending over 
the body of his wretched son. The pastor, coming 
out from Mass, heard of the tragedy and hurried 
to the father's side to comfort him in his hour of 
sorrow and shame. "Be brave, my good man," 
said the priest ; "this is, indeed, a terrible aflliction 
that has come upon you, but you must bear up 
under it like the Christian man that you have 
always been. Remember, my friend, that you have 
other children, all of whom are a credit to you and 
the parish. Come, come! You must be a man 
now, and don't take this to heart !" 

The old fellow straightened up and looked at 
his pastor with surprise. "Take it to Hart, is it 



The Destiny of Erin 155 

ye say? What d'ye take me for, Father? Indade, 
sir, I'll take it to Moran, like a dacent man !" 

In the very hour of his poignant grief he did 
not wish the pastor to think him a "Hart" man ! 

Such, then, is Erin's singular equipment for the 
out-working of her destiny — Humor, Pathos, 
Loyalty, Her history proves how desperately she 
needed and how effectively she has made use of 
all the three. 

The story of Erin is the story of almost unceas- 
ing struggle against foes who hated her, not be- 
cause cupidity desired her few green acres, nor 
because the thirst for power excited sovereigns to 
covet her dominion, but simply and solely on ac- 
count of her religion. To have turned Protestant 
would have meant for Ireland absolute immunity 
from English antipathy and centuries of devastat- 
ing wars. Down to our own days apostasy was 
the demanded price for instant peace, freedom and 
honors. Poverty, the enforced ignorance of her 
children for generations, exile to the four corners 
of the earth, insufferable penal statutes and a 
humiliating subjection to her ancestral foes, make 
up the sum that Erin has never hesitated to pay for 
loyalty. 

Even before the terrible times of Elizabeth Ire- 
land was not free from sufferings for the truth's sake. 



156 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

And there is an almost ironical touch in the fact 
that it was in the pontificate of Nicholas Brake- 
speare (the only Pope who was an Englishman) 
that the king of England first secured any sort of 
sovereignty over Ireland. 

That step inaugurated the long series of wars, 
revolutions and outbreaks which have kept the 
wretched country in a state of almost continuous 
unrest. 

And, humanly speaking, how strange it seems 
that God should have permitted the occurrences, 
especially of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
ries! 

Province after province on the Continent fell 
away from the authority of the Holy See ; and God 
must have beheld the steadfastness of the British 
Isles. Then, after the lust of England's king had 
cut the English from the communion of Rome, and 
Scotland and Wales had followed with itching ears 
the preachers of strange gods, how — one would in 
reverence say it — how God must have rejoiced to 
see than Erin faltered not. 

And one might add the hope that for such faith- 
fulness God would abundantly bless that brave and 
steadfast land wherein, amid a universal and loud 
apostasy, his truth was cherished and his service 
done. 



The Destiny of Erin 157 

But what do we actually read was the result? 
England waxed great, Scotland and Wales grew 
fat and prosperous, and Erin bore the lash of awful 
persecutions for three hundred years ! Why? Is 
God, then, blind? Is He unmindful of his own? 
Has He not even common thanks for those who 
bear and die that his great Name may live? Pa- 
tience ! I am about to come to that. 

The eye is very apt to turn to where some rock 
obstructs the current of the stream and breaks it 
into agitation, foam and spray; and the historian 
is apt to dwell on the great breaks and cataclysms 
of the past, unmindful of the quiet turnings of less 
noisy portions of the great stream of Time. 

More things were happening at the beginning 
of the sixteenth century than just the "Reforma- 
tion." Columbus and a score of others were daily 
adding undiscovered regions to this world of ours. 
And on the chess-board of Eternity God was mys- 
teriously and silently moving his ''pawns" with eye 
on very distant situations in the "Game." 

In spite of Spanish and French and Portugese 
and all the rest who did so much in those first days, 
it was, as we now know, to be the men who spoke 
the English tongue that were in time to occupy 
and shape the countries in far-away America, in 
Asia, in Africa and in the Islands of the Sea. 



158 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

But what has all of this to do with Erin's des- 
tiny? Much! Very much! 

On the anvil of unconquerable patience and 
loyalty God was striking the blows that gradually 
shaped the destiny of Erin. Such devotion to the 
Faith must be forged, and they forge only when 
the iron is hot and when the hammer falls heavy 
and oft. Who could have foreseen the spread of 
the English language? Who could have foreseen 
the enforced exile of millions of Irish people? Who 
could have foreseen that these two facts combined 
to so enlarge the borders of the Catholic Church 
that today she has no more vigorous or more prom- 
ising fields anywhere than in those immense conti- 
nents where the imperious Anglo-Saxon has pushed 
his institutions and his speech — so that God's faith- 
ful Celt might bear the saving truths of holy faith 
around the world? It was for this that Gaelic gave 
place to the hated English; it was for this that 
Erin's children were tortured into feeling that exile 
was the only course. 

To an audience so largely Celtic I could not 
hope to say anything new or instructive on the his- 
tory of Ireland for the past two hundred years. - 

You all are too familiar with the heart-rending 
details — the ebb and flow of hope; the risings so 
full of promise — only to end in the magnificent 



The Destiny of Erin 159 

defeats and martyrdoms; the thrilling tales that 
are still told in ever}- parish in the old country ; the 
heroism of your priests, returning at the risk of 
life, to bring the saving Sacraments to the unter- 
rified though hounded faithful ; the burning of your 
ancestral homes ; the breaking of your fathers' for- 
tunes and your mothers' hearts ; the hunger, desti- 
tution, ignorance, famine, pestilence and death — 
all this you knew as soon as you were old enough 
to understand anything. The story of the '' '98," 
the various uprisings since, the failure of the potato, 
the sweeping tides of emigration that have reduced 
the population of the old country to scarcely one- 
third of what it was seventy-five years ago — all this 
you know. All this is history, and it is this that 
must forever make the Epic of Erin a triumphant 
dirge. 

But sufifer me, an aHen though I be, to tell you 
of some of the glorious results and phases of your 
destiny. 

A great many years ago — before ever I was a 
CathoHc myself — I met a dear old-fashioned Irish 
parish priest with whom I conversed for several 
hours on the Irish in America, where the good man 
had never been. 

He asked me many questions and told me many 
most affecting anecdotes culled from his own expe- 



i6o Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

rience. ''America," said he, ''will never be able to 
repay old Ireland for the sacrifices she has made." I 
drew the old man on to tell me what he meant, and, 
with a charm which it were idle for me to try to 
reproduce, he went on to say : "Not once, sir, but 
scores of times, I've seen the like of this. There'd 
be a poor old body who had already sent out half 
a dozen children to the new world, which at that 
time seemed to our simple people millions of miles 
away, and she had but the one young girl at home 
to be her comfort and support in her advancing 
years. And the poor old mother would pray, as 
only a mother can, that this one last darling might 
not have to go to far-off America, but that she 
could stop at home to be by her side in the twilight 
of life that was coming fast. But the sad day would 
come. The brothers and sisters would write that 
the girl should come out, and so the old mother 
would begin to prepare for that last good-bye. Oh, 
sir, how often have I witnessed a scene like that! 
On the fatal day, after holy mass, the two of them 
would go up the lane to wait for the coach that was 
to carry away the child to Dublin or Cork on her 
way to America. Then the mail would come up the 
highway in a cloud of dust. And, scrambling up 
to her seat on the top, the girl would wave her hand 
cheerily as long as she could see her mother stand- 



The Destiny of Erin i6i 

ing there. And then the sorrowful return to the 
bit of a cottage; and once inside, with the door 
closed tight, can you fathom, sir, the depth of the 
anguish of that mother's soul? Kneeling there be- 
fore the poor little statue of Mary, can you see her 
fingers — old fingers, mind, and twisted with rheu- 
matism — going from bead to bead as the mother 
on earth begs the Mother in Heaven to watch over 
and keep her last little girl as she sails away to the 
great unknown world with her virginal heart and 
her big, wide eyes that have never seen evil? From 
every parish, sir, in Ireland that stream of mothers' 
tears has been flowing out to America." 

And what became of that girl and her brothers 
and sisters here in America and in Australia and in 
India and at the Cape and in the remotest corners 
of the earth? What fruit came of such unspeakable 
sacrifice? I will tell you, though you already know. 
The Church of the living God was spread, the 
Kingdom of Christ built up — that is what came of 
it, that is what the destiny of Erin wrought out 
for the benediction of the Nations. 

Wherever Pat went and Maggie and Bridget, 
the brave young priest was soon at their heels, and 
so it has come to pass that hundreds of Bishops 
and thousands of priests and tens of thousands of 
Sisters are now extending the Hght of the Truth 



1 62 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

in every part of the English-speaking world, and 
that churches and schools and hospitals and or- 
phanages are everywhere, because the poor old 
mothers in Ballyhulish and Knockwinnock and 
Ballymagar sent out the children to whom they 
had taught the faith of their fathers, and because 
these sons and daughters, wherever they went, took 
that faith with them undimmed and unsoiled! As 
in the beginnings of Christianity in many parts of 
Europe, the Irish missionary priests and scholars 
went out from the famous old seats of Celtic piety 
and learning to preach the Gospel, so again in our 
own times one has but to glance at the Clergy 
Directory to see that the zeal of Erin still burns 
bright and warm ; for her sons are to be found min- 
istering before the altars at the antipodes. A Cardi- 
nal Moran in Australia and Gibbons in America, 
a hierarchy in which Celtic names abound by the 
hundreds and a priesthood in which they occur by 
the thousands, give very marked proof of the point 
that I now wish to make : that the sufferings which 
led a home-loving people and an intensely patriotic 
race to leave their native land by the millions have, 
in the ineffable providence of God, redounded to 
the glory of his Holy Name and brought the saving 
truths of Catholicity to men and places to which, 
had the Celt remained at home, the Faith could not 



The Destiny of Erin 163 

have been so soon or so effectually extended. And 
here, it seems to me, were glory and destiny of the 
supremest order. 

This brings us to the closing and practical con- 
siderations of the present discourse. It must be 
remembered that not only has the dispersion of the 
Irish had a tremendous effect upon the destiny of 
America and other English-speaking countries, but 
it has also had a tremendous effect upon the destiny 
of the Irish themselves. There has been action, 
and, of course, reaction. The success of the chil- 
dren of Erin in this country has, indeed, been mar- 
velous. Coming here for the most part through 
the goad of necessity and struggling penniless in a 
foreign land inimical to their reHgion, the Irishman 
has forced his way to the top in every department 
of our complex Hfe. Here again his wit, his pathos 
and his partisanship have stood him in good stead. 
Emotional, enthusiastic, self-reliant, he has wrought 
out his salvation in his own Celtic way, and today 
we see him active, successful, contented in every 
profession, every trade, every degree of wealth, 
culture and power. What is to be the final outcome 
of it all? Those of us who believe in Erin's destiny 
cannot but watch with serious interest anything 
that may have power to divert the splendid force 
which she has shown was hers for truth and right- 



164 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

eousness through centuries into less noble channels 
making for ends less high. The cross has been 
lifted: will Erin now forget? 

Amusing instances might be adduced by thou- 
sands to show how perfectly Erin has mastered the 
opportunities which the immense and varied life 
here in America has opened to men. 

They tell one story that is too good to lose. A 
zealous Bishop in the Northwest, anxious about 
possible scattered children of the Church in regions 
of his diocese wholly inhabited by Scandinavian 
Protestants, sent a young missionary priest upon 
a tour of quiet investigation among the towns and 
hamlets. In one large town with many hundreds 
of thrifty inhabitants the priest could find no Cath- 
olics at all. But, on the other hand, he found 
Swecjes and Norwegians innumerable. About to 
leave the place, he made a last attempt to find a 
stray Catholic, and went into a shop and asked if 
there was not at least one Irishman in town. The 
proprietor thought for a few moments, and then 
replied: ''Yes, come to think, there is a man by 
the name of Casey here." Sure that he was on the 
right scent, the worthy priest was leaving the shop, 
when the shop-keeper called him back, exclaiming : 
"Say, Mister, there is one other Irishman in town 
by the name of Murphy." ''Good !" said the mis- 



The Destiny of Erin 165 

sionary, "and where can I find these two men, for 
doubtless they are Catholics?" ''Casey is the 
mayor and Murphy is the chief of police !" answered 
the shop-keeper. There does, indeed, seem to be 
nothing too good for the Irish in America! The 
question arises, Is this freedom from persecution — 
are these immense opportunities for development 
affecting the Celt adversely or beneficently? One 
disposed to make hasty generalizations might feel 
that the answer must be that the Irish in prosper- 
ous and free America are not as zealously fulfilling 
their destiny as their humbler but more pious 
fathers in the old country. He might point to the 
rich Irish Catholic of the larger cities, with his 
contemptible desire to be thought to be a ''liberal" 
Catholic and very superior to the "common Irish" 
of the parish. He might call our attention to the 
mixed marriages which are the outcome of absurd 
"social aspirations" on the part of some people 
who think themselves too good for the Church, 
and whose parents were just plain, old-fashioned 
Irish Catholics from Kerry or Cork. 

He might remind us that well-to-do Irishmen 
are beginning to send their sons to Harvard and 
Yale (where their Faith is constantly maligned and 
libeled by sapient little kindergartners known in 
this country as "Professors") and not to the Jesuit 



1 66 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Colleges or to the Christian Brothers or to Notre 

Dame Universit}^ — the reason for this amazing bit 

of vulgarity and disloyalty being that they desire 

their sons to make useful social connections and to 

i) get into good society generally. If in the process 

! they lose their faith, of course it is a deplorable 

I accident; but the fear of this must not be allowed 

to interfere with the social advancement ! 

He might further point out that the young 
Catholic dandy, who may or may not hear Mass 
of a Sunday, according to the Aveather, is certainly 
a degenerate descendant of the sturdy Celt, his 
grandfather, who would walk ten good old Irish 
miles rather than miss Mass. He might seriously 
question whether the fashionable young Catholic 
lady's faith, in the elegantly appointed drawing- 
room, is as staunch as that of her poor old grand- 
mother, who is unceremoniously hurried back into 
the kitchen when ''company" comes in, with her 
old cap and plain old-country manners — and, per- 
haps, her pipe ! 

Where are the reHgious pictures banished when 
the younger generation transforms the old home 
in an effort to bring it "up to date"? There used 
to be holy water in the little font hanging by the 
doorposts of Irish homes. The fonts are still to be 
seen in many Irish homes — filled frequently with 



The Destiny of Erin 167 

hairpins and dust! Rosary used to be said by the 
whole family each night. What family is ever 
together for any purpose in our hurried and arti- 
ficial city life today? And so the pessimist might go 
on indefinitely adducing evidence in support of his 
contention that the Irish are not fulfulling their 
destiny in this country. But there is another side 
to this question. In the sudden and radical evolu- 
tion of a people such as the entire population of 
xA-merica has been swept through in a very brief 
time, it is inevitable that there should be a certain 
amount of ill-considered and mawkish so-called 
growth on the part of pushing and generally vulgar 
people. 

The Irish in America have, of course, not wholly 
escaped this evil any more than other races who 
make with them our heterogeneous people. 

Environment has reacted upon them as it always 
does upon all those who are sufficiently alive to 
think and feel and act and aspire. 

A period of readjustment has been made neces- 
sary for these adaptable, emotional, enthusiastic 
and religious people. But not for one minute can 
I be made to fear that the great body of the sons 
of Erin will, or can, so far forget their glorious past 
as that they will not see to it that their future be 
just as glorious. There will be those who will 



1 68 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

perish in the blinding glare of social life, there will 
be some who may go down through poHtics or 
drink or greed in the commercial world; but there 
will never come a day when Celtic mothers will 
no longer bear the sons whom God needs at his 
altars, or when the sound, strong, passionate heart 
of the Irish race will no longer beat with devotion 
to the Vicar of Christ at Rome and be stirred to 
any sacrifice called for in extending and upbuilding 
the Church of the living God ! Oh, my friends, let 
me, an outsider, as it were, beg you to consider 
the rock from which you are hewn ! You, young 
man and young woman, with the good old Irish 
blood in your veins, for God's dear sake be proud 
of your ancestry, emulate their virtues, forget not 
the sublimity of their devotion to the truth! Be 
Americans of such a type that no man dare to 
question your absolute adherence to every sacred 
principle of our glorious Constitution — but you 
can best be this by being what your great Irish 
fathers and mothers were, namely, unflinching 
defenders of liberty and right upon the only suffi- 
ciently secure foundation for such sacred gifts — 
the One Holy Catholic and ApostoHc Roman 
Church! 

I must let you go now, but sufifer me to tell you 
just one more story to bring out these last few 



The Destiny of Erin 169 

points that I have been trying to press upon your 
acceptance. An EngHsh tourist was driving around 
the lake of Killarney in company with a neighbor- 
ing parish priest, and they soon were good friends 
and fell to discussing the Irish character. The 
priest assured the rather skeptical Englishman that 
one could always count upon a witty answer in 
Ireland. The Englishman laughed at this and 
offered to bet a shilling that the first man they 
might chance to meet would prove to be a fool. 
The good priest, not to be outdone, put his own 
shilling on top of the Englishman's, and the jarvie 
was appointed stake-keeper. They drove along, 
and, as fortune would have it, the first man they 
passed on the road was a young drover, taking his 
cattle to the next market town. They stopped in 
order to settle the wager. 

"Good morning !" said the Englishman. ''Where 
are you driving your cattle?" 

''To the fair, your honor !" 

"And what will you get for them at the fair?" 

"Oh, by the help of the saints, I should get four- 
teen pounds a head for them." 

"That is no price for them, my man," continued 
the tourist; "why don't you take them over to 
God's country in England, where you could get 
twenty pounds a head for them?" 



170 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

The fellow, with a look of supreme disgust, 
replied : ''x\h, why don't I take the lake there to 
hell, where I would get a guinea a drop for it?" 

The jarvie at once handed over the stakes to the 
priest in silence, and all went on their journey with- 
out further effort on the Englishman's part to 
belittle the reputation of the Irish. 

Observe, my friends, what the young drover 
had done. First, he had maintained the fame of 
Ireland in one particular, at all events, as I would 
have you strive to do in other and more glorious 
ways; second, he had paid his very vigorous re- 
spects to that country which had for centuries 
oppressed his own, by comparing it to heaven's 
dread antithesis. And I would urge you to feel 
that all that does not make for Catholicity is, if 
you have a spark of real Irish in you, your foe to 
the death; and third, he had incidentally slipped 
an extra shilling into his reverence's pocket by 
winning the bet so handily. Go and do likewise. 

:|i sH ^ sjj ^ 

And what is to be Erin's destiny as the ages roll 
forward into the unknown future? God, of course, 
alone knows. But God asks men to help him in 
the supremest of his works, the salvation of the 
world. Erin of old heard the great call of God in 
a way that must for evermore make her name noble. 



The Destiny of Erin 171 

She bowed her shoulder to bear the heaviest burden 
of suffering ever imposed upon a people for the 
sake of Faith. 

Surely she will not falter now, when the burden 
has been mercifully removed" and in its place a 
limitless opportunity has been opened to her chil- 
dren to enter into the largest life ! 

Surely she will continue in her God-appointed 
mission of spreading the light of the one true Faith ! 

Surely her daughters will remain the spotless 
models of virtue that the very enemies of Erin have 
proclaimed them ! 

Surely her sons will come in ever increasing 
numbers to devote their lives to the service of God 
in the sublimest of all ways possible to man ! 

Surely, as the years lengthen into eternity, Erin 
will open into fuller and deeper and holier realiza- 
tion of her great destiny ! 

May God grant that some word that I may have 
said tonight may help but one of Erin's children 
to bestir himself or herself to do all that is possible 
in the furthering of that glorious cause which has 
been in so singular and exalted ways the destiny of 
Erin! 



^:::^^i 



3Bt, 5^mtit|)otst, 



DR. WINDTHORST. 



DREAMERS are, after all, the practical men. 
It is upon the canvas of the imagination that 
those pictures are first painted which the so-called 
men of affairs afterwards project into accomplished 
"facts.'' 

The man of ''facts" is apt to sneer at the the- 
orizer, notwithstandng that all the Gradgrinds to 
the contrary have been unable to achieve "success" 
of any kind until some despised dreamer in the 
visions of the night has seen the distant hills 
wherein the treasure lay. 

From Napoleon down, the men who have 
affected the march of events in the most radical 
way have been they who were also seers and proph- 
ets, viewing life first from the coign of vantage 
which the imagination alone affords. 

Dreams are alone eternal ; for, as the poet says, 
"A dreamer lives forever, but a toiler dies in a day." 

The nineteenth century was certainly the epoch 
of practical achievement, but as one reviews the 



176 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

history of that magnificent era it is impossible to 
avoid seeing that it was the men free from what 
Emerson calls ''the tyranny of particulars," the men, 
that is, who had the horizons of large empiricism 
and whose minds were ''merged in the large accep- 
tance" of vast ideals who shaped events. 

The "toilers" did but reap where the dreamers 
had planted, and mine where they had located the 
rich deposits. Men who are both, men who pos- 
sess imagination and the will to do, are the only 
truly great. 

And among these, I presume, history will 
always place him who in many ways was the most 
potent force in modern European politics, the Iron 
Chancellor, the man of "blut und eisen" — Otto 
von Bismarck. 

In this remarkable man we have a striking 
example of the combination of lively imagination, 
an almost romantic idealism and an invincible will. 

Here was a hero-worshipper, a mediaevalist, a 
hard-headed, merciless martinet and a cool, calcu- 
lating politician, all in one. And one side of his 
character postulated the other. He dreamed, as no 
other modern had dreamed, of Empire; and he 
drilled armies and formulated poHcies capable of 
creating an empire. He worshipped the qualities 
of Alexander, Caesar and Frederick the Great, and 



Dr. Windthorst 177 

then built up with Titan blows the theatre in which 
his own beloved King could and did grow into a 
Kaiser of their heroic mold. He guilded the actual 
with the beauty of the romantic and ideal and then 
transformed the actual into what he considered the 
ideal. 

From his mother we learn that the boy Otto 
was difficult. She, good soul, was utterly unable 
to comprehend him. Stubborn, absent-minded, 
willful, young Bismarck caused his mother many 
an anxious hour, for, as she said, ''Otto will have 
his way. When he is in bed I cannot get him out, 
and when he is up I cannot get him to go to bed. 
When I need him in the house he is abroad, and 
when I wish him to go out he remains at home a 
nuisance!" 

It appears that he was little disposed to heed 
commands, cajolery or threats from her; but when 
his father would bellow out, ''Otto," the boy would 
jump, and, standing at "attention !" obey at once. 

Stretched full length, his chin on his big, round 
hands, he would dream a whole day looking out 
over the sea ; and could one have watched him, he 
would have seen that the lad was planning sieges 
and campaigns in the sand in front of him — in high 
colloquy with the military geniuses of all the past. 

His was a Teuton heart, his a feudal soul. Very 
early, as his study of history familiarized him with 



178 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

the achievements of the great, he began the evoki- 
tion of that which we shall presently see became 
the ruling passion and dream of his whole life. To 
the minutest details he came to know the story of 
Prussia; and the House of Hohenzollern, with 
Frederick the Great at its head, became the theme 
of all his musings and the inspiration of all his life 
plans. Well did the boy know that the king — the 
"Koenig" — was, in the beginnings of German 
glory, ''the can man," the man, that is, who can! 
And as his romantic nature drew ever deeper and 
deeper draughts of inspiration from the Feudal 
times, Bismarck began to incarnate in his own king 
the splendid qualities which were at the first the sole 
title to kingship. 

And he was, indeed, blessed in having for his 
king the noble, manly, free-hearted giant, William 
the First. A ''Koenig" truly, a man, Bismarck felt, 
who most surely "could" — if opportunity were 
given him. 

Together wdth this hero-worship there went in 
his mind the unconquerable beHef in autocratic 
power. Society could now, he held, be conserved 
by regaining the ground lost during the democratic 
advance of the previous fifty years, and vesting all 
authority in a paternal government. "The People" 
to him was a very dangerous phrase, coined by 



Dr. Windthorst 179 

irresponsible demagogues for the purpose of fur- 
thering their destructive policies. 

Empire! That was the object of the young 
man's soul. Empire on the lines of the magnificent 
Holy Roman Empire which had made Germany so 
glorious in mediaeval times. To unite the scattered 
and disrupted German peoples, to build one vast 
Vaterland, with Prussia at its head, and his king 
for Kaiser ! 

Such was the dreamer, Otto von Bismarck, as 
a youth. And the theatre of European politics 
soon began to shape itself for the tremendous effort 
to realize his dreams. Time is lacking, of course, 
on this occasion, for even a superficial review of 
the march of events that led to that fatal (though 
characteristically gigantic) blow by which the Iron 
Chancellor sought to perfect his Herculean task, 
and which proved to be the opportunity for the 
sublime achievements of him who is the subject of 
this lecture. But you must let me remind you of 
the climax of the great movement which raised 
Bismarck to world-power, and brought about, as 
he supposed, the necessity for the attempt in which 
he was so ignominiously thwarted by Windthorst. 

Whatever other portions of Germany may or 
may not have been busied about, Prussia had, for 
more than one generation, kept her eye on one 



i8o Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

thought — Potsdam ! Potsdam, with its severe dis- 
cipHne, pipe-clay and patriotism. Prussians were 
made, first, last and all the time, soldiers. Barrack 
life had inured every able-bodied man to the coars- 
est food, the hardest beds, the most callous feet, the 
sternest orders, the splendid sense of suffering for 
one's country. So when, in the rapid development 
of an intolerable situation after the Austrian war, 
Prussia saw that a struggle with France was only 
a question of a little while, she it was that was best 
able to rally to the German standard the petty and 
discordant elements that loosely composed "Ger- 
many." There could be no doubt of success when 
one considered Potsdam and all that Potsdam 
meant. Then came the crisis — and we all remem- 
ber the excitement of our youth when the thrilling 
news came that a war had broken out between 
France and Germany. The terrible campaigns did 
not leave the result long in the balance. Strasburg, 
Metz, Sedan ! How it all comes back to us ! And 
at last that day of unspeakable humiliation for 
proud, chivalrous, courageous France, when Paris 
fell and the muddy boots of thousands of hated 
Prussians trampled the sward in the Champs Ely- 
sees, and to the accompaniment of the "Wacht am 
Rhein" the victorious battaHons passed beneath the 
almost sacred arc de Triomphe ! 



Dr. Windthorst i8i 

That last act of the awful tragedy was the 
supreme moment of Otto von Bismarck's life. For 
the next day, in the presence of royalty and the 
representatives of all powers, in the magnificent 
palace of the French kings, he proclaimed his be- 
loved koenig the Kaiser, Wilhelm I., amid the 
roaring of cannon and the acclamations of all the 
German peoples. Here, indeed, was the glorious 
coming true of one of the most stupendous dreams 
that mortal man ever had dreamed! And the tri- 
umphal march back to Berlin ! With bells fairly 
leaping out of cathedral towers, and mothers hold- 
ing their little ones out of high windows to see the 
Kaiser, and Catholic Bavarians hugging Protestant 
Saxons, and merchants from Hamburg singing 
songs with Berliners, and men from the Rhineland 
hail-fellow with Prussians, and nobody caring 
whether it were Pilsener or Muenchner-Hofbraeu 
that he drank, and everybody hoarse with loud 
''Hochs!" United! All Germany! And leading 
this multitude, wild with the thrill of the new-found 
Vaterland, rode the giant the Kaiser, and close at 
his side the giant the Chancellor, Otto von Bis- 
marck. 

A Greek dramatist would drop his curtain here. 
But in life, alas, it is not always found that ''they 
lived happily ever afterwards." 



1 82 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Bismarck's real life-task began after the culmi- 
nation of his vast policy of German federation. 
Here was at last a federated Germany, but now to 
make it a homogeneous people ! And, be it said 
to his credit, the future historian will need to dwell 
with more admiration on the policy, resources, 
forcefulness and triumphs of Bismarck as a states- 
man, engaged in the solution of most intricate and 
well-nigh insoluble questions, than on the romantic 
Bismarck hewing his way toward power and the 
achievement of his passionately-desired ends. 

Everything characteristic in the German peoples 
was against him. And, while under the stimula- 
tion of a new and glorious idea — that of the Vater- 
land — he found it possible to overcome antipathies, 
jealousies and suspicions which had divided petty 
states for centuries, when the serious business of 
placing the hastily federated independent powers 
upon a permanent basis involving submission to 
Prussian imperial control was taken in hand, he 
needed not only the iron grip which no one 
doubted was his own, but also the velvet glove of 
a Machiavellian diplomacy, which scarcely anyone 
knew that he possessed. Remember who these 
people were whom he must now weld into a homo- 
geneous and submissive nation. Germany was, 
until the Franco-Prussian War, a group of innu- 



Dr. Windthorst 183 

merable little states, the names of many of which 
I could almost certainly declare most of us have 
never so much as heard. Prussia and Bavaria and 
Saxony and the two or three other large powers 
were surrounded by this countless number of prin- 
cipalities, duchies, kingdoms, all of them geo- 
graphically and otherwise insignificant, but none 
the less independent and proud with the pride 
which smallness necessitates if one wishes to be seen 
and heard at all. For centuries these ''royal fami- 
lies" had "ruled" over their Httle quarter-section 
dominions and maintained the most punctilious eti- 
quette at their little "courts." Thackeray has shown 
us, in his inimitable way, a delicious picture of the 
tempest-in-a-teapot sort of a life that was lived in 
these petty German courts. Such stickling for pre- 
cedence, such heartaches, such wounded feelings, 
such swellings of pride ! If the Oberhofmeisterine 
was given a higher place at dinner than the Ober- 
hokappelmeisterine, there was sure to be a long 
and bitter war, and the momentous question could 
not be settled until the Chancellor had consulted 
the Privy Council and a royal commission deter- 
mined the matter. 

And then the jealousies and bickerings between 
the little states themselves. The Prince of Saxe- 
Minnigen-Coburg-Gotha-Schwerin wanted it dis- 



184 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

tinctly understood that he took precedence of the 
Graf of Saxe-Guttenburg-Werishoeffen-Graetz ! 
The fact that nobody outside of these diminutive 
countries had ever heard of their existence did not 
in the least deter their serene highnesses from giv- 
ing" continuous comic opera performances, which 
the historian of curiosities records as a dehghtful 
contribution to the gayety of the nations. In addi- 
tion to these certain manifestations of self-impor- 
tance, which all small people and small individuals 
must make so as not to be stepped on, there was the 
greater difficulty confronting Bismarck of the deep 
and time-honored differences of religion and racial 
proclivities. 

Bavaria and Wurtemburg, Alsace and Prussia 
had scarcely more in common than the German 
language, and eVen that was so differentiated by 
local idioms and pronunciation that those who 
spoke it reviled those who (from their point of 
view) butchered it. Then, too, there was the grow- 
ing commercial rivalry between the great ports and 
manufacturing cities. And, to make his task seem- 
ingly impossible, there was the natural fear of 
Prussian encroachment and the humiliating loss of 
independence on the part of the old, sovereign 
powers which Bismarck's ''United Germany" in- 
volved. 



Dr. Windthorst 185 

But to this gigantic problem the giant addressed 
all of the powers of his mighty mind and bent all 
of the force of his tremendous will. 

He succeeded — or nearly so ! There was one 
element of danger as he supposed, one vital, inte- 
gral element in the national life which he had not 
yet got under his control ; and that, of course, meant 
to his policy a menace and a weakness. Absolutism 
was of the very essence of Bismarck's philosophy, 
and the vast imperial superstructure could not, in 
his opinion, be thought permanently safe as long 
as any considerable portion of the people were, in 
matters having to do with education, morals and 
social principles, not absolutely under the guidance 
and direction of the state. Bismarck was far from 
being the first great statesman who dreaded the 
influence of "another king, even one Jesus" — a king 
whose kingdom is not of this world. The Roman 
Emperors had vainly striven to crush a movement 
which for centuries was the work almost exclusively 
of penniless and socially insignificant people. 
Edicts and oppression and persecution and world- 
wide power proved absolutely ineffectual against it. 
And in three centuries it had overwhelmed the 
throne itself and become the dominant force in the 
world. And later power after power and emperor 
after emperor had had to "go to Canossa" in one 
way or another. So the Iron Chancellor was right 



1 86 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

when he feared that one gentle nun left free to 
teach the sublime principles of that other and 
higher kingdom was a possible element of uncon- 
trolled and uncontrollable influence which his 
notion of absolutism could not brook. 

He no doubt was perfectly aware of the enor- 
mous difficulty which his policy was sure to encoun- 
ter, but had he not successfully overcome prejudices 
and animosities and all sorts of apparently impos- 
sible obstacles? 

To Bismarck there was only one line open — the 
straightest to his object. His object was the com- 
plete unification of the German peoples. Between 
himself and this he fancied that the Catholic 
Church, as at that time organized and operating in 
the Empire, offered a barrier which must be modi- 
fied and brought, Hke all others, under his own 
immediate control. 

So he plunged at once, with characteristic vigor 
and bluntness, into the task of getting the eccle- 
siastical machinery into his own hands. 

He introduced and successfully carried forward 
into actual law the series of bills aimed at the free- 
dom and autocracy of the Church which is known 
as the ''Kulturkampf," or the ''May Laws," from 
the name of the month in which they became oper- 
ative. 



Dr. Windthorst 187 

These laws were without exception the most 
outrageous invasion of the religious rights of mil- 
lions of loyal citizens that even a prime minister 
had ever devised against the Kingdom of Christ, 
which is saying a good deal. They brought the 
entire Hierarchy into the most humiliating and 
intolerable subjection to the state. Bishops must 
be appointed by the (Protestant) government; the 
Catholic press must be absolutely edited by the 
same government; the utterances, acts, and even 
the ceremonial of the clergy must be regulated by 
the police; the religious orders must leave the 
Empire, the Catholic schools must all be closed, 
and the right to instruct children in religion must 
be exercised only under the close scrutiny of gov- 
ernment officials of another faith. 

Penal statutes of the most severe kind were 
passed and enforced to compel obedience. The 
result, of course, was immediate and terrible. 

The brave clergy were cast into prison by the 
score. The teaching orders were exiled. The faith- 
ful were persecuted. The schools and a great part 
of the churches were closed. In a year the priest- 
hood of one part of the Empire was reduced, by ex- 
ile, death and imprisonment, from ten thousand to 
less than four. The sacraments and instruction be- 
ing entirely withdrawn from the people in many 



1 88 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

places, religion and morality were seriously threat- 
ened, and mothers and wives beheld a spirit of indif- 
ferentism and bitterness taking the place of the 
spirit of Christ in the hearts of their sons and hus- 
bands. 

But the Church was not supinely yielding to 
the tyrant and monster of diabolical hatred that 
Bismarck had now become. No ! From every 
quarter came the voice of defiant protest and the 
inspiring evidence that the spirit of the martyrs was 
alive and fervent. 

Bishop Ledochowski, who was heroically suffer- 
ing for the faith in a prison cell, received the red 
hat which raised him to the Sacred College of 
Cardinals while still incarcerated, Leo XIII. thus 
showing his magnificent scorn of the German 
butcher and brute. A little old man, himself a 
prisoner in the Vatican, without a corporal's guard, 
without an acre of land, defying the man of blood 
and iron with his more than a million Potsdam 
soldiers under arms and drunk with the new wine 
of a glorious success ! 

Bishop after Bishop and priest after priest suf- 
fered imprisonment, exile, confiscation of goods, 
death itself, rather than cease protesting against the 
scandalous abuse of brutal power. 

But the protests of a clergy thus tied hand and 
foot could result only in the moral support of the 



Dr. Windthorst 189 

faith of their people, and could scarcely be expected 
to accomplish much in the way of political and 
legislative redress. Where were the laity? Where 
were they who could do something of a practical 
and effectual sort in the way of organized agitation? 
Alas, at times of general distress many are found 
who leave to some one else the duty of acting. 
Men are busy. Men deplore much that they do 
nothing to correct. But while the great masses of 
the Catholics of the Fatherland were too bewil- 
dered or too indifferent or too helpless to act, there 
wxre men who did have the requisite courage, zeal 
and ability to act and to act tremendously. There 
was the venerable Mallinkrodt, whose great mind 
and whose greater heart had been thrown, with a 
lion's courage, into the seemingly hopeless attempt 
to sway Bismarck from his insane policy. There 
were the brothers Reichensperger, there was von 
Schorlemmer-Alst, men whose powers of mind and 
heart would have made them an honor to any 
cause. But scarcely was the battle for God and the 
truth fairly on when Mallinkrodt passed away, and 
the movement was left without his immensely val- 
uable leadership and counsels. And the enemy 
waxed stronger and stronger. New and subtle 
arguments were advanced so cunningly that not a 
few of the elect themselves were being drawn, if 



190 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

not into acceptance of Bismarck's views, at least 
into a general attitude of "liberal German Cathol- 
icism," as opposed to the uncompromising Roman 
Catholicism of the clergy. 

It was declared that there w^as no disposition 
on the part of the government to destroy or oppress 
the CathoHcs as such; but what was attacked and 
must be overcome, sooner or later, was the inter- 
ference within the German Empire of Italian and 
other foreign influences. There was no objection 
to the Jesuits, but as their General was always a 
foreigner, and might at any time be a Frenchman 
or other anti-German, it was contrary to sound 
policy to allow these emissaries of a foreign and 
possibly inimical head to teach young Germans in 
the schools of the Empire. 

Be German Catholics! Be men! Free your- 
selves and your children from the degrading sub- 
mission to Latin enemies of everything Teutonic ! 

Come to your God-given independence, and join 
us in our magnificent effort to build a solid, united, 
homogeneous Germania which will dominate the 
world ! This had its effect. To some tempera- 
ments there is nothing so attractive as just such 
flattery. To be told, for instance, in this country: 
''You are too intelligent to believe as the illiterate 
Catholics of the decadent Latin countries. We 



Dr. Windthorst 191 

understand, of course, that the wise old Church 
does not expect a man Hke yoit to accept things in 
the simple and unthinking way that the Spanish 
or Italian peasantry do. As an x\merican CathoHc, 
you, of course, have a more liberal and progressive 
view of theology." This sort of twaddle tickles 
some. And so in Germany a few ecclesiastics went 
ofif into the ridiculous fiasco of the ''Old Catholic 
Movement," of which Windthorst afterwards said : 
"They call themselves the old Catholics because 
they are, as a matter of fact, the very newest kind 
of Protestants!" Mallinkrodt was gone to his re- 
ward. The Bishops were either actually in prison 
or equally debarred from any action. 

The rank and file, hopeless or apathetic, knew 
not which way to turn. And the Iron Chancellor, 
at the zenith of his power, was triumphing over the 
prostrate and helpless Church. Surely here was 
the army of the Philistines in invincible array 
defying the armies of the living God. Here was 
the Goliath Bismarck every day flinging the taunt 
and the insult in the face of the children of light. 
But was there a David? Was there in this hour 
of terrible darkness and despair a champion able 
and wilHng to pick up the gage of battle which the 
giant threw down? There was! Windthorst, a 
dwarf, an unknown and practically friendless and 



192 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

penniless man, stood forth and challenged the 
snorting and contemptuous giant. 

Stooping to pick up the pebble of Principle from 
the clear stream of Truth, he put it in his sling of 
dauntless enthusiasm, and, before the giant knew 
what was taking place, the David of German Cath- 
olic Truth had brought him to the dust, and, with 
his heel on the neck of the fallen monster, was dic- 
tating the terms on which he would allow him to 
stand again ! 

Who was this marvelous man? What has God 
wrought before our very eyes in the making and 
inspiring of a soul hke this? Oh, my brothers, give 
me your ears, while I remind you of the sublime 
achievement of this our comrade and fellow in the 
only cause great enough to enlist the life-endeavor 
of deathless and thinking men. 

Dr. Windthorst, by reason of his sagacity, had 
been entrusted with a place in the cabinet of the 
little kingdom of which he was a subject prior to 
the federation of Germany. And it was while he 
held that portfolio that he gained the nickname of 
the "kleine excellentz" — little exellency — ^which he 
bore all through his after life. It was given him 
because of his very diminutive stature, being not 
more than half the height of his great antagonist 
Bismarck. His head was huge and his little legs 



Dr. Windthorst 193 

not of the straightest, and his massive features made 
up a countenance which had been hideous had it 
not been for the gentle, loving eye and the benig- 
nity and strength of the expression. Alert, careless 
of his appearance, simple as a child in his habits 
and manners, pure, generous, courageous, eloquent 
and enthusiastic, the little excellency came into the 
Reich or Imperial Parliament at the supreme mo- 
ment when the cause of Catholic independence 
required him. The ''Right" was composed of the 
solid, conservative, thoroughly Bismarckian ele- 
ments, wholly devoted to the policy of creating 
and maintaining a feudal, strongly centralized and 
autocratic government ; and, of course, the Kultur- 
kampf, aimed as it was at the suppression of the 
freedom of the clergy, was cordially accepted by 
the "Right." 

The "Left," on the other hand, was made up 
of the heterogeneous crowd of radicals, sociaUsts, 
malcontents, rebels — the rag, tag and bob-tail 
which usually comprises "protest." From these 
Catholicity could look for scant consideration and 
no succor. There were the two great opposing 
parties in the Imperial legislature, so when little 
Windthorst came in, he could turn neither to the 
right nor to the left, and thus sat in the center. That 
center or centrum, which he found the only neutral 



194 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

spot on which he could base his vast programme, 
has now become the ruHng- element in the Reichs- 
tag, and is so closely associated with his brilliant ca- 
reer and thrilling campaigns that you must give me 
a minute for its consideration. Fancy our little 
dwarf, then, if you will, entering the Parliament and 
squatting himself ungainly in the center, looking 
unconcerned and good-naturedly at the glaring 
ranks of the ''Left" and the mildly contemptuous 
and supercilious ''Right." 

Think of the little chap quietly munching a 
Wienerwurst on his little stool there, and waiting 
and watching and praying for his opportunity. 

He well knew the power that inheres in all "cen- 
ters." Do you recall how in childhood we played 
at see-saw? How a big boy might be matched by 
one equally big at the other end of the teetering 
board — but that it was as the tiniest one, who stood 
in the center and was called "candlestick," put his 
foot, now on this and then on that side, that the 
big boys were sent up or down? 

Philosophers speak of a "tertium quid" — a third 
something, and the history of Europe has more 
than one example of cosy smallness holding "the 
balance of power," ready to dictate frequently to 
big, equally-balanced powers, each one of which 
could gobble the snug little "candlestick" up, were 



Dr. Windthorst 195 

it not for the other ! Take Switzerland, for example. 
How often have avaricious eyes not yearned over 
her fair valleys and matchless mountains? But 
were greedy German eyes to peer over the North- 
ern Alps, and hungry German lips to say : ''Mein 
Gott! Das ist ein wunderschoenes Land!" alert 
French, Austrian and Italian eyes would look over 
the Southern Alps, and exceedingly pointed ques- 
tions would be asked in diplomatic but unmistak- 
able language. And meanwhile would Switzerland 
go on the even tenor of her way secure from all 
impertinent ogling on the part of those rude giants 
her neighbors. 

The center is your place on a see-saw, and when 
contesting bignesses would appreciate the other- 
wise insignificant proffer of assistance by modest 
littleness. And Windthorst sat in the Centrum and 
watched the Titan forces of retrogression grappling 
the Titan forces of progression. 

Outside of Parliament he was not idle. All over 
the Empire he was arousing, organizing, marshal- 
ing the discouraged and cowed Catholics. 

Observe the wisdom and far-reaching poHtical 
sagacity of his line of action. The issue as he out- 
lined it was not a theological or even ecclesiastical 
one, but purely a question of individual political 
rights. While he caused the guilds and sodalities 



196 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

of pious women to pray to Mary, in whose sweet 
month of May the blasphemous and cruel laws had 
been passed, he urged the men to remember that 
it was their personal rights as subjects and their 
constitutional rights as men that they must arise 
to defend, the famous motto that he adopted and 
which soon echoed throughout the Empire at 
every gathering of Catholics, shows his tact and 
ability as a political leader. He was fighting the 
enemies of the Church of God, he was specifically 
attacking laws aimed at the Bishops, he was the 
champion of Catholic truth; but his motto says 
naught of religion; it appeals to those sentiments 
which no body or party of men in a civilized coun- 
try could or would condemn. What was the motto? 
"Freiheit, Wahrheit und RechtT Three simple Ger- 
man words, whose meaning required no study, 
whose truth none could deny. "Freedom, truth and 
the right !" That was all, and that was everything. 
He asked for Catholics no favors, he demanded for 
them no privileges, he bespoke for their doctrines 
no acceptance by others ; he merely said : ''We are 
Germans, and as Germans we expect, at the hands 
of our beloved Fatherland, in common with all our 
fellow patriots, freedom, truth and the right !" So 
it was "Freiheit, Wahrheit und Recht" everywhere 
— on badges, on banners, on letters, on every man's 



Dr. Windthorst 197 

tongue. To the remotest country parishes went the 
indefatigable dwarf giant, preaching his gospel of 
freedom and truth. And in very short space of time 
he had a wave of superb public opinion back of him 
wherever he went. And there he sat in his "candle- 
stick" center, ready to fight, ready to advance the 
glorious cause, were it only a hair's breadth, nearer 
to victory. 

The story of that long parliamentary struggle, 
in which this man, beginning practically alone and 
against the most strongly-entrenched and arbitrary 
combination of hatred and power, finally (through 
sheer tact and supreme genius) triumphed, must 
remain one of the most remarkable and absorbing 
in the annals of debate. 

With an adroitness that alone would have made 
him famous, Windthorst never missed a chance to 
throw the weight of his marvelously telling elo- 
quence and such votes as he could command, on 
one side or the other, into the ever-increasing 
struggle between the Conservatives and Radicals. 

In announcing his position on each question as 
it came up he found a strategic opportunity for 
advocating his Freiheit and Wahrheit, and of 
applying his principles to the current issue. 

A few fortunate occurrences, in which his sid- 
ing with one or the other party meant defeat or 



198 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

success, established him and his no longer neg- 
ligible Centrum in a position of felt importance. 
Then came that larger opportunity for which he 
had so earnestly striven, when he could make his 
own policy and his own contention the issues to 
be fought out on their merits. 

And it was now that he drew down upon him- 
self the full torrent of Bismarck's terrible wrath and 
overwhelming vituperation. 

But the little hero remained calm and collected, 
while the giant stormed and raved like an infuriated 
bull. 

Many a time he would explode some towering 
bit of imperial eloquence by muttering some quaint 
word or two without so much as rising from his 
seat. It seems that on one occasion Bismarck so 
far forgot the courtesies of debate as to refer to 
Windthorst's appearance, and ended by declaring 
him to be a double-faced little man whom he could 
ignore. 

Windthorst at once sprang up, and, facing the 
House, said : "Fuerst Bismarck has said that I am 
double-faced. My heavens ! If I had any other 
face, does anyone think that I would be wearing 
this one?" 

It is probable that the force of the great Chan- 
cellor's argument on that day was lost on the Lords 
and Gentlemen. 



Dr. Windthorst 199 

Pressing his demands with each new advantage, 
Windthorst was soon in a way to cause Bismarck 
very serious anxiety. More especially when the 
far-reaching and very profound labor troubles and 
socialistic agitation began to menace the larger 
cities of Germany did Windthorst find the coveted 
opening for the preaching of his mercilessly logical 
thesis: "No religion, no morahty; no moraHty, 
no government!" It was not difficult for him to 
constantly show how injurious to the state had been 
the closing of the great schools of the religious 
orders. "You cripple the Church, you deprive the 
children of their moral guides, you dry up the spir- 
itual fountains at which weak men drank strength 
and steadfastness, you stamp out the light of re- 
ligion and the consequent sense of eternal respon- 
sibility, and then, when your Godless house begins 
to shake, you turn to us, forsooth, and beg us as 
decent citizens help hold your roof up ! Yes, we 
will help you, but give us first freedom, truth and 
the right !" 

That was an argument which many heard and 
pondered. It rang true. Again, if at any time the 
government, in its fierce determination to quash 
all freedom of utterance and of association on the 
part of the people, attempted to carry through some 
measure in which the sacred principles of liberty 



200 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

were grossly outraged, Windthorst would throw 
the weight of his fast growing influence on the side 
of the ''Left," thereby frequently defeating the 
purposes of the majority and always securing for 
himself the cordial support of the radicals and pro- 
gressives in furthering his campaign. 

At last his hold on the Parliament was such as 
no one could afford to ignore and still less to 
antagonize. 

Then he began to formulate the direct attack 
upon the Kulturkampf. He proposed nothing 
short of absolute repeal of the obnoxious May laws, 
and the consequent complete restoration of all their 
rights to the Catholics of the Empire. Bismarck 
was not slow to scoff at this presumption, and he 
early pointed with ridicule to what he was pleased 
to call Windthorst's ''medisevalism." 

He scornfully asked if the little fellow was asleep 
and dreamed that it was the fourteenth or fifteenth 
century. 

Did anyone in his senses imagine that the great 
German Kaiser, in the full noontide of the modern 
world, when the power of the Roman Church was 
reduced to a purely spiritual guidance of a limited 
number of the less enlightened, would, like some 
cringing, superstitious emperor of the Middle Ages, 



Dr. Windthorst 201 

crawl to Canossa to sue for favor at the hands of a 
Httle, powerless Pope shut up in the Vatican gar- 
dens? 

The idea was simply puerile, thundered the man 
of blood and iron. And surely the trend of Euro- 
pean politics did not seem to indicate the success 
of a movement looking toward the restoration to 
Bishops of their former independence and freedom 
from state interference. 

The treachery of the Emperor of the French, 
which had resulted in the overthrow of the Papal 
states, the growth of Freemasonry in all the old 
Catholic countries, and the popularity of the prin- 
ciple of "Ssecularism" — all seemed to forecast fail- 
ure for such an effort as Windthorst, against awful 
odds and against the current of Nationalism which 
was still flowing joyously through the German 
heart, was preparing to make for the liberty and 
exaltation of holy mother Church. 

Steadily, however, he unified and inspired the 
faithful by means of the associations and clubs 
which were now being founded on every hand, and 
persistently he pressed, by speeches and strategic 
skill in parliamentary warfare, his uncompromising 
demand for Freiheit, Wahrheit und Recht. 

Poor Bismarck had his two strong hands full 
of many troubles other than those brought to him 
by the little excellency. 



202 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Time after time the commercial rivalries, the 
historical jealousies of the reigning families in the 
lesser states of the confederation and the ever- 
growing restlessness of the working classes, well 
nigh proved too much for even his grip of steel. 

And above him, beloved by the whole people 
and far more disposed than the Chancellor to treat 
all of them with leniency and conciliation, was the 
great Emperor William I. 

From the start Windthorst believed that the 
case of the oppressed Catholics could yet be so pre- 
sented to the generous and just Kaiser as to compel 
his big, magnanimous heart to see the injustice and 
to right it. 

At length events so shaped themselves as to 
enable the dauntless champion of truth to press 
his contention to an absolute issue. 

From all parts of the Vaterland petitions 
flowed in upon the Emperor and delegations waited 
upon him as on a father of his people. 

The more important of these direct appeals 
were always timed so that they would coincide with 
some particularly acute distress of the government, 
caused by the uprising of socialistic schemers or the 
outbreak of threatening discontent and disorder in 
the dangerous classes. 

It was hard for the kindly and fatherly Kaiser 
to refuse to see the logic that connected these 



Dr. Windthorst 203 

serious symptoms in the body politic with the sup- 
pression of the restraining and elevating influences 
of religion in so many parts of the country. 

Well did he know that none of his millions of 
subjects had more gloriously acquitted themselves 
in the great war with France that had elevated him 
to his imperial power than the lusty and hearty sons 
of the Catholics. Who, for example, had proved 
more valiant, able and successful before Paris than 
the King of Saxony and his brother, Prince 
George? Yet these two princes belonged to one 
of the most devout Catholic families of Europe. 
And where in all of Germany could one find a more 
industrious, honest, patriotic and loyal people than 
in Bavaria and all the other exclusively and in- 
tensely Catholic states? 

Why, then, were these selected for special dis- 
crimination on the sole ground of their religious 
principles and denied the sacred rights granted by 
the very constitution to all subjects indifferently? 

Against this "weakness" of his imperial master 
the adroit Bismarck was quick to interpose no end 
of sophistries and arguments, drawn from expe- 
diency and the best interests of the country. 

But the cold calculations of a heartless politi- 
cian, while they may and do suffice frequently to 
control and shape the action of legislatures, cannot 



204 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

in the long run drown the voice of a simple, child- 
like conscience as it utters itself in the heart of a 
just and compassionate man. - 

It is because expediency can thwart the nobler 
impulses of men that all false and unjust laws and 
prerogatives flourish ; but it is also because it can- 
not even for a m.oment deceive conscience that they 
do not last, and that the voice of the people in time 
always must come to be as well the voice of God. 

The Kulturkampf was accepted by the men in 
power because Bismarck was able to convince them 
that nothing must be allowed to stand in the way 
of an immediate and complete unification and 
amalgamation of the German peoples. For so 
sublime and providentially-indicated a destiny any 
possible hardship and injustice must be inflicted 
on the Catholics without a qualm, and should be 
borne by them cheerfully as a test of their loyalty 
to the All-Germany principle. 

And the sophistry passed for sound argument, 
until Windthorst began his magnificent appeals to 
the pure conscience of his fellow Germans. 

From the moment that one man after another 
saw the truth in its real light, were he Lutheran, 
agnostic or what you like, from that moment Bis- 
marck had lost a follower to the extent of being 
no longer able to plead justice for his cause. 



Dr. Windthorst 205 

And when at last the Kaiser came to see the 
matter in its abstract state as a question of simple 
right or wrong, Windthorst had won; for 
William the Great was not the man who could 
deliberately sin against the light in a matter espe- 
cially involving the eternal welfare of multitudes 
of his children who had in countless ways shown 
themselves the very mainstay of solid government 
and of domestic and civic virtue. 

Like a gladiator hurHng himself at his wavering 
foe for a last and crushing blow, Windthorst now 
entered upon the final stages of his long and untir- 
ing contest. Where in the history of great political 
campaigns is there a parallel to those brilliant last 
hours of the struggle that culminated in the repeal 
of the May laws? 

Straight to the bar of the Emperor's personal 
conscience, and marshaling a dozen timely reasons 
for that conscience to act in accordance with its 
own good promptings, the little Hercules pressed 
the issue for immediate trial, while his gigantic 
enemy writhed helplessly in the midst of an inex- 
tricably awkward situation and harassed by innu- 
merable conflicting interests. The see-saw tipped 
madly up and down — now this end up and then 
that end up ; but, never losing his control of the 
lift or the fall for a minute, the Httle "candlestick" 



2o6 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

held and applied the balance of power. The end 
came quickly. After an ineffectual last attempt by 
Bismarck to accomplish certain vitally impending 
purposes without surrendering to the Catholic 
"Centrum," tlie Kaiser sent for the Chancellor and 
uttered the most memorable and the most kingly 
words of his life. He said : "Mann muss dem Folk 
seine Religion wieder-geben !" — We must give their 
religion back to the people! No statesman in a 
thousand years has said words more profoundly 
wise. No political economist will ever say any 
words that would suffice for these. 

We must, indeed, give the people their religion, 
or build our empires on the quicksands of passing 
fancy and the wholly unreliable passions and emo- 
tions of men. 

The May laws were to be repealed! Catholics 
were to be treated as all others were ! The sacrifice 
was again to ascend from the altars; the schools 
were again to instil the eternal truths into the hearts 
of the little ones ; the preaching of God's word was 
again to be unlet and unhindered; and religion, in 
her garbs of mercy and peace and justice, was to 
safeguard the state as Potsdam armies and the 
police could not ! 

Gloria in excelsis Deo! What a day for the brave 
and long-suffering faithful of the Vaterland! 



Dr. Windthorst 207 

And it was the month of May, the month of 
Mary. With chastened joy Windthorst rose in his 
place in the Reichstadt to express his conviction 
from the first, that Germans could not permanently 
deny to Germans any right, any privilege enjoyed 
by themselves. 

And now, behold they were about to tear out 
forever from the statute book a series of laws placed 
there by themselves. Why? Simply because they 
had been shown that these laws were unjust. It 
was not an hour for vainglorious exultation over 
a great victory; it was rather an hour for devout 
thanksgiving and for congratulating the German 
people on the superb fact that nothing that is un- 
just can remain German ! 

With delicious wit he expressed his happiness 
over the fact that the issue had been reached in 
May, the beautiful month of flowers and sunshine ; 
for his love for the beloved Kaiser was such that 
it would have grieved him to have seen His Majesty 
making the journey to Canossa in mid-winter, as 
his august predecessor had been compelled to do 
centuries ago ! 

Leo XIII. had met the German Empire and 
the Church had won. A dwarf, without a party 
or followers or money or station had encountered 



2o8 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

the greatest and most powerful man in Europe, and 
the Iron Chancellor was lying prostrate asking for 
terms ! 

Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the 
Kulturkampf, and the triumph of a layman over 
the powers of the world in one of the most terrific 
and insidious warfares that was ever waged against 
the Church of Christ. 

Before bidding you good-night, suflFer me to 
draw one or two thoughts from the life and the 
work of Windthorst. 

In the first place, the effect of his character and 
his example has been most striking in the forma- 
tion of a type of sturdy laymen in Germany which 
gives even the casual tourist the impression that 
Faith is a living, vigorous and inspiring reality in 
that happy land. 

To hear a churchful of stalwart Teutons bellow- 
ing out the responses at divine service and thun- 
derously singing the hymns at Benediction of the 
Most Blessed Sacrament is to have one's own faith 
strengthened and one's heart cheered. 

The Catholics of Germany today are second to 
none in the world in the intelligent, out-spoken, 
uncompromising practice of their religion. 

Innumerable clubs, societies and leagues serve 
to hold men of all ages and conditions together, 



Dr. Windthorst 209 

while the splendidly educated and pious clergy lead 
them in repeated public expressions of a vital and 
missionary faith. 

There is a forthrightness and candor about the 
layman in Germany which one may trace directly 
to the persecutions under the May laws and the 
heroic defense of the truth made by the brave lead- 
ers under the inspiration and guidance of the inim- 
itable Windthorst. 

And in a wider sense also Windthorst has left 
the influence of his glorious life on the very struc- 
ture of the German Parliament and its present 
methods of operation and the state of political par- 
ties. When he began his ParHamentary career the 
"Center" was more of a theoretical point of view 
than a force which either of the opposing wings of 
the Chamber needed to consider seriously. 

We have seen how, little by little, he drew the 
fairer-minded and the more judicious and less parti- 
san to one side or the other as the various issues 
presented themselves. And, later, how he had 
about him a permanent body — not large, but very 
determined and very able — of men who held them- 
selves free from the entanglements of both ex- 
tremes of politics, with an eye single to take an in- 
dependent and conscientious stand on each ques- 
tion as it arose. This nucleus has now become the 



2IO Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

great Centrum, the controlling force in the politics 
of the Empire, and which will have from hence- 
forth not only to be recognized, but yielded to, in 
many of the serious issues upon which will be found 
to hang the future of all. 

It is indeed a splendid achievement to have 
created a permanent force in the ruUng body of 
a great world-power, which has for its sole principle 
and motive the solution of all questions in terms 
of Catholic philosophy and in accordance with that 
poHtical economy taught by the Son of God. 

Such is the German Parliamentary Centrum, 
and it has found increasing numbers of scholarly 
and devout men ready to carry the traditions of its 
immortal founder. 

Only the other day we were called upon to 
mourn the death of Windthorst's successor, Dr. 
Lieber, whose immense ability, untiring enthusiasm 
and spotless character have done what God alone 
can measure in placing the Catholics of Germany 
and the Church in Germany upon a plane of 
extraordinary influence and usefulness. 

After a few years spent in rejoicing with those 
for whom he had done so much, Windthorst, full 
of honors and loved as few men have been, lay 
down to enter into that rest which must indeed be 
sweet to them who have served as he served. 



Dr. Windthorst 211 

On the occasion of his last public appearance 
at the great annual meeting of the federation of 
Catholic societies from all parts of the country, the 
venerable man received such an ovation as few ever 
have been worthy to get, and his pathetic, thrilling 
address sounds like the voice of a prophet indeed 
as he bade them rem.ember that there shall never 
come a time when the world, in one way or another, 
will not be at enmity with the Church. 

And as for ourselves, my friends? AVhat has 
the life of the little excellency for us of inspiration 
and rebuke? 

We are so blessed as to be citizens in a land 
where, in all likelihood, the time will never come 
when the rights which are the very cornerstone of 
our constitution will be withdrawn fromi any of us 
or when any man calling himself an American will 
be seriously molested in the free exercise of his 
religious Hberty. 

No Iron Chancellor shall ever enact a Kultur- 
kampf among us. On the contrary, as time passes 
no one can fail to notice the growing spirit of 
charity and good will which characterizes those 
who yet unfortunately differ in religious convic- 
tions. No poHtical party could exist here that 
publicly assailed the faith of any portion of our 
great and happy family. 



212 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

But if history teaches us anything, it is that the 
real enemies of the Church, they that have been 
able to wound her almost mortally, have been, not 
the organized political, external and avowed foes 
— for these she has crushed triumphantly ever — but 
the foes who were her own children, the enemies 
which she had suckled at her own breasts. 

Our dangers here in America will be more dan- 
gerous than those Avhich beset the Church in Ger- 
many when the David Windthorst went forth to 
challenge the champion of the Philistines. 

Our peril will be that which betrays itself only 
after the symptoms show that the disease is too far 
gone to stay. 

Our difficulties shall be found to be those of the 
will and the mind. We are set here in the midst 
of a magnificently prosperous and pagan civiliza- 
tion, in which material success is the incentive and 
earthly good the end of every effort. Luxury, 
indifferentism in its subtlest forms, the comfortable 
philosophy of ''Get there !" — all this will and does 
tend to militate against that higher and more truly 
Catholic view of life for which the Church has stood 
through good repute and bad repute for close to 
two thousand years. 

Here, as ever and everywhere, there is the great 
gulf fixed, whether we like to belie s^e it or not — 



Dr. Windthorst 213 

the great gulf, I say, fixed between the Hght and 
the darkness, between the Catholic and the false 
philosophies and standards of life and all that enters 
into life. 

Here no man of Blut und Eisen will restrict our 
right to approach the Sacraments ; but a myriad 
hands more mighty will dispute every step we take 
in the up-hill path toward the Hght. 

In free America no officials will close our 
schools; but at every hand the hawkers of error 
entice our children, and Propriety and Respectabil- 
ity countenance the very teachings of Hell. 

No fear that our Clergy will be cast into prison ; 
but which one of them would not rather preach, as 
did Ledochowski, from a dungeon, than be shut out 
from reaching us by our sapient cocksureness and 
''liberal" thought which comes at last to take a pat- 
ronizing attitude toward the priest as a man of ex- 
cellent intentions — but sadly out of key with the 
times ! 

In the May of no year shall we ever see the 
passage of laws aimed at our Hberties as Catholics ; 
but year after year we do see laws passed that re- 
duce marriage to a state of scarcely more than 
legalized prostitution; year after year we do see 
laws ignored, in the unrebuked breaking of which 
can lie only our social damnation. 



2 14 Orations of Henry Austin Adams 

Never anywhere was the Church more beset by 
insidious, cunning and dangerous enemies than 
right here and now in our own beloved land. 

Therefore there is call-and occasion for each man 
of us to come to our ''Centrum." There is room, 
there is desperate need, for the stuff of which 
Windthorst was made. In the glorious out-work- 
ing of our national destiny their part will be found 
at the last to have told for the true and the right 
who have stood in God's exquisitely poised and su- 
perbly effective ''Center." 

Ho ! then, for recruits for the glorious Centrum 
of Catholic life ! We have no more need to count 
our chances for success, no more need to fear our 
failure, than Windthorst had that day when he sat 
himself down alone to watch and prepare for the 
issue. 

Standing there in the eternal right, the only 
truth, the majestic all, what have we to fear or to 
count on? The May will come each year, and in 
that year that it shall please God we shall be found 
rejoicing at the time of flowers, for that our enemy 
has been laid Ioav, and foolish laws whereby they 
thought to crush us have been every one repealed ! 

Let us stop at^anossa; for thither must all the 
powers of the world come in sackcloth and ashes 
before the last. 



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